Last Summer in Arcadia

by Deirdre Purcell

Genres: General Fiction; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

One summer changes everything... From the No 1 Irish bestselling author Deirdre Purcell comes Last Summer in Arcadia, a novel of marriage, family and survival. Perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy and Cathy Kelly. 'Intimate, yet distinct. Purcell juggles voices deftly to deliver a snappy read, releasing revelations with mounting tension' - Irish Independent The tension is palpable as Tess and Jerry Brennan sit in the drawing room of their wonderful house high above the sea, waiting for the police to arrive. Tess is facing the consequences of her own actions, innocently undertaken but devastating in their outcome; Jerry has been caught out in a misdemeanour, a transgression men have made since time began but one that in his case has repercussions that will mean the end of a successful career. Adding to Tess's agitation is the knowledge that her two best friends are facing parallel traumas of their own. Life skated along for the three couples until last summer when they all travelled to the village of Collioure in the south of France. Now they have everything to lose: their marriages, their family lives, and their friendships. What readers are saying about Deirdre Purcell: ' Unerringly perceptive, Last Summer in Arcadia is a compellingly written, powerful exploration of the complex mix of love, trust and compromise' ' Warm, insightful, funny and poignant ' ' Five stars '

Release date: March 15, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 384

Sample

Last night I dreamed that everything was as it had been in Arkady. The curtain had not gone up on the theatre of the past two months, and life was routine, even dull. The dream held one gleaming detail: I was happy.

In it, I was preparing a large lasagne, Tom and Jack were playing a complicated two-handed computer game on Jack’s laptop, and Jerry’s key was turning in the lock of the front door as he rejoined us from work. This dream, therefore, was set on a Friday, because on every other weekday, and on some weekends, my husband was not able to get home for dinner, or supper as we call it now. To give him his due he normally tried to hold Fridays sacrosanct, unless he was abroad.

I slipped the lasagne into the oven and turned to greet him. But his hair was long and ringleted, and he had grown a beard and whiskers. He was the Beast from Beauty and the Beast.

I woke up, pulse hammering in my throat, but could hear no echo of a scream in the bedroom, or even in my head: my screaming, too, must have been part of the dream.

I also knew instantly that the monster reference had come from seeing the stage show earlier this year at the Point. This was irrelevant because as my pulse slowed, reality, like a veil thick with soot, floated slowly downwards from the corona over our bed to cover me with dread. I looked at the bedside clock: it was just after half past five. Jerry’s side of the bed was vacant – and cold.

What I did hear, seeping through the house, was the unmistakable blare of horns and trumpets from the family room downstairs. He always listens to The Ring when he is distressed and I could picture him, hunched miserably in his leather ‘listening’ chair, pulling on a cigarette. He gave up smoking almost six years ago but, because of what has happened, has reverted to consuming twenty, maybe thirty a day.

We all smoked, years ago, everyone in our close circle, Fergus and Maddy, Rita and Ricky, Michael and I. We smoked unthinkingly – lighting up as we reached to answer the telephone, took the first sip of tea or coffee, before we went to bed to top up the nicotine for the night. Earlier still, Maddy, Rita and I had smoked our heads off over yellowing towers of civil-service files long before the non-smoking ethos hit the institution; and years later, while the new health-consciousness was sweeping into Ireland from America, I was furtively glad when Jerry replaced Michael that he smoked too: I did not have to give up just yet.

From our bed, I listened for a while as Wagner’s narrative, ethereally dimmed by distance and expensive wool carpeting, rose and fell.

Appreciation for music is one aspect of my youth that still stands to me – not that you would know it, these days: I have not touched the Steinway in the drawing room for years, and as for my cello, the object I used to choose without hesitation as the one item I would save from my burning home, I have not seen it since it was put away for safekeeping when Jack was born nearly eighteen years ago. (Having left everything to the professional movers, I did not even notice it during the transfer to Arkady.)

Over the years, Maddy, Rita and I have operated a sort of musical barter system: they would agree to come to the National Concert Hall with me, if I would go with Maddy to stage musicals or with Rita to ‘icon’ performances – Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Sandie Shaw, Garth Brooks.

The Diamond concert at Lansdowne Road football stadium is particularly memorable for Rita’s delight. Actually, ‘delight’ does not quite cover the hopping, dancing, waving bundle of ecstasy she was on that occasion. I can still see her, red woolly hat bobbing above the collar of her sheepskin jacket; I can still feel her sturdy biceps gripping mine as she hauled me to my feet.

By far the most zest-filled of us three, she excelled herself that night, succeeding in cajoling four out of five of the spectators in our area of the cold, windy stand – young, old, middle-aged – to join her in yelling along to ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Love On The Rocks’ at the top of their voices.

And I remember looking across at Maddy, so healthy then, catching an expression on her face that I can describe only as surprised joy as she, too, belted along at top volume. I ached for her. Maddy is a performer and she should have been enabled to do her thing. Rita and I should have pushed her harder – and to blazes with Fergus and his needs.

I am not sure why that vivid little episode at Lansdowne Road has floated to the surface of my mind after . . . what is it? Four years? Five? And at this point of crisis. Or why I am describing it to you at such length.

Perhaps it is because uncomplicated pleasure like it has been absent this summer. Or perhaps, at the risk of sounding defensive, I need to illustrate from the outset that I can and do enjoy myself.

At that concert, for instance, once I overcame a reluctance to look silly by waving my arms in the air, I forgot my embarrassment and joined in with a full heart. And when the micro-dot below us that was the singer himself had left his piano for the last time, I led our section in turning to Rita, including her in a standing, cheering ovation. (Being Rita, she acknowledged our homage as graciously as if she were the Queen Mum.)

Secretly, I long to be swept away like that every day, to be an extrovert like she is, instinctively sociable and ‘uncomplicated’, but my upbringing and early training has served to embed in me an innate reticence. My two best friends would describe me accurately – and with some understatement – as the quietest of us. Within my house, I am confident, Arkady’s chatelaine. Outside it, while I hope I give a good impression of being briskly in charge, I feel far from it.

I read somewhere that shyness is a supreme form of selfishness. There is some truth in this: reserved people like me operate within a circle of self-assessment – do they like me? – and can detect barometrically the chilliness or warmth of response to a fraction of a degree. In my case, certainly, a ‘third eye’ operates whenever I am with more than one or two people – You idiot! Why did you say that? Now they’ll think you’re stupid! – and sometimes, as you will see, it operates to take me out of my body altogether.

I am aware that even by offering an apologia at such an early stage – Make allowances for me, please. Like me. Look beneath – I am hanging myself.

Enough. You will judge me for yourself.

Maddy certainly seems to take me as I am but Rita has not given up on trying to break me down. At every opportunity she tries to draw me out, as she would call it, and while she is respectful of it, insists that my passion for listening to what she calls mourning music, has coloured my personality too darkly. Consequently I have been dragged not only to her concerts but to circuses, Funderland, even Torville and Dean. Thank God for gusty, gutsy Rita. Thank God for Maddy, too. Thank God for the two of them and their support. Without them I might have been a sad sack altogether, even a social recluse – Jerry has always been too busy to attend any event where he is not entertaining corporately.

I did not go down to comfort him this morning in the family room because I have run out of things to say and, in any case, I find I am still ambivalent. My heart has burned to ashes, if that is not too melodramatic but that is how it feels. There is a bitter, cold, gritty feeling in the centre of my chest.

As I relate this now, it is five hours after that horrible waking. And as we, my husband and I, sit here in the drawing room of Arkady, staring at the sea-fog trailing its ragged coat on the calm, drab water far below, I feel nothing much.

The thoughts running through my head are at half, even idling speed and, strangely enough, have little to do with the immediate traumas of the past couple of months and weeks. At present I am at the mercy of others so no panicked thoughts or worries on my part will shift what seems to be inevitable.

I have therefore reverted to the mundane. Assuming that I can find someone to take care of Tom (who is at that awkward age where he does not want a baby-sitter but still needs one), I might play tennis this afternoon, but only if this fog lifts. Or perhaps even if it does not.

I might telephone Rita or Maddy, or both, and we could meet for coffee in town. Or we could sweep through one of the shopping malls we can all get to, these days, on the M50 – we haven’t been together on an outing like that in Dublin for ages.

I might go to the cinema – I have not seen a film for a very long time.

Or then again, I might just make a start on clearing out my wardrobe. Those charity-shop sacks glare accusingly at me from the hall table every time I pass.

Jerry, who is sitting across from me, seems shrunken. He is more than six feet two inches tall, but today he seems as little as an old man although he is barely fifty. On a normal day at this time he would be at work, running the universe.

I must not be glib.

How did this whole thing start?

Where do I start?

I was an old child. When I look back on early snapshots I see a grave, unsmiling little girl with an ugly pudding-bowl haircut and a worry line between eyes that observed too much. Internal time has not moved much for me and in middle age I feel exactly the same – and just as worried – as I did when I was seven.

I do not mean to imply that I had an unhappy childhood or that I have always walked under a permanent cloud. It is not so. Our lifestyle is privileged now and I would be thoroughly ungrateful if I did not thank God for it.

And I love Jerry. I definitely do. I have made that decision and just as I hold fast to Arkady, as a beautiful, consoling constant in this floorless world, I will try to hold on to that, too, whatever happens.

I will not begin this narrative, as a child does, on the day I was born. This is not my life story: it is an attempt to put order on the chaos around me. Maddy and Rita, no doubt, will tell you from their points of view how they have coped with this past summer – and with me. Thank God none of us could see into the future before it bore in on us all to such nuclear effect.

For my part, I will be trying to re-create events, conversations and feelings as they occurred on the day, eschewing hindsight. Or is it foresight in this instance? We do not live our lives chronologically, I think: more and more, as the years go on, I might seem to be living mine in a continuum, so that events of twenty or thirty years ago are re-imagined alongside what actually happened yesterday or, even, what is happening now. I am not unique in this, of course: our minds all work this way, whether we recognise it or not.

In any event, I will relate my story as much for myself as for the record, mostly in an effort to understand how my husband and I came to this point, too drained to speak to each other while we wait for the police to arrive.

Knowing where to begin is difficult but I think the best way to set about it is to go back to the month of May and the day we departed for Collioure.

From the moment I first heard it, the smooth young voice of my husband’s PA reminded me of a clarinet, the plaintive, virginal notes of which I had loved since first hearing the instrument.

Although Susan had been working for Jerry for more than nine months, I had never asked him to describe her, not wanting to give the impression that I was insecure. Naturally, she and I had introduced ourselves over the telephone and we spoke to each other a lot, sometimes daily, to co-ordinate the domestic and work diaries.

At some stage he volunteered that she was smart and dressed well, and if I were asked at that time to guess what type of woman went with that dulcet, slightly husky voice, I would have plumped for a tall, slim brunette. That busy mid-May day of departure, though, I was far from visualising her as we spoke.

Rita insists that a woman’s brain can cope with up to seven tasks simultaneously and I was certainly multitasking during that call, ticking items on a fistful of last-minute lists and interrupting myself to shout instructions at the boys, who were still rummaging around upstairs. ‘I was just about to call you, Mrs Brennan,’ she said, immediately after answering. ‘The car is outside. It will be leaving here in about five minutes.’

‘Great.’ I ticked ‘garlic crusher’. I never travel anywhere without my own: I find that, no matter how plush the rental accommodation, they never include a decent one in the inventory.

‘And Jerry asked me to tell you he’ll meet you at Check-in with the others. He had a few things he wanted to finish up here.’

I placed a red mark against ‘Jerry’s Lens Fluid’. He had only recently converted to contacts and was very fussy about them. ‘That’s fine. Thanks, Susan.’

‘I hope you have a wonderful holiday, Mrs Brennan.’ She never called me Tess.

‘We will, if we ever get out of here!’ ‘Gold Sandals.’ Tick. ‘Jungle Formula. Mobile phone charger.’ Tick. Tick. ‘’Bye now!’ I hung up.

We, our gang of three couples and assorted offspring, had been holidaying together for ten years. We hired two minibuses – ‘people-carriers’ now – choosing a different destination each time. The stipulations were that the house had to have a pool and enough bedrooms – at least six – with three en-suites, for the adults, a cleaning and cooking service, and that it was less than an hour from a golf course. For the youngsters it had to have satellite TV and computer connections in case it rained, and also to be within walking reach of a beach so we wouldn’t have to drive them all the time. And, very importantly, it had to be within striking distance of a large town or city so we girls had somewhere decent to shop.

There was one other rule, introduced by the three women three years ago: no one could take more than one suitcase. This was designed to cut out competition between us and, more particularly, between Rita’s girls as to who looked most glamorous in the evenings.

Or so Rita and I insisted. The subtext was that she and I did not wish to show up Maddy, whose wardrobe is not as extensive as ours. She has enough on her plate without having to worry about feeling inferior to us in the clothes department. Although it makes no intellectual sense, this does matter among friends.

I reread the last-minute instructions for Mrs Byrne, our treasure who, during the month we were gone, would come to the house for two days each week instead of her usual three. I wanted her to clear out the hot press and bag up any towels, face flannels or sheets that had passed their sell-by dates. She could drop them off at one of the charity shops on her way home. She was also to take down the family-room curtains for collection by the dry-cleaner . . .

I tore a fresh sheet from my pad:

And if you have time, Mrs B, it would be great if you could take up the rugs in the den and the drawing room – and the study of course – and, weather permitting, ha-ha!, give them all a bit of a beating out in the fresh air.

Mrs Byrne and I had been together since we moved to Arkady.

I chewed at the end of the ball-point. Then:

That’s it, I think. All the routine stuff, too, of course. Don’t forget to water the ficus and check the sell-by dates of the stuff in the freezer, and there’s quite a bit of ironing in the laundry room. And I’m leaving the machines running so you’ll have to empty them. Thanks. Hope everything’s OK at home. See you on 17 June! I’ll bring you back a parrot!!!!!!

I added the fresh sheets to the sheaf of instructions already bulging under Mrs Byrne’s magnet on the fridge and looked round my pretty pastel kitchen, with its free-standing, fretworked cupboards under their festoons of dried herbs and lavender. From behind the doors to the utility and laundry rooms came the low, satisfying hum that told me all the machines were doing their cleaning thing.

Then the familiar clench under my breastbone: if Mammy could only see how well I’d done! She would be in awe of Arkady, that’s for sure. There isn’t a day I don’t think about her and I still really miss her, even though she’s been dead for nearly forty years. At this stage of my life, I find it difficult to separate my real images of her from those I have created. I wondered for the thousandth time what she would have made of Jerry.

I cast a last look round my lovely kitchen, then hurried into the hall. ‘Come on, fellas,’ I yelled, from the foot of the stairs. ‘The car’ll be here in five minutes. Get your act together!’

‘Mummy, I can’t find my Wranglers.’ Tom, wearing only underpants, shoved his head through the balustrade across the landing from his bedroom.

‘No time to look for them now, sweetheart, we’ll buy you a new pair in Duty Free – OK?’

‘Pathetic!’ Jack came out of his room, beside his brother’s, and barrelled down the stairs.

‘Don’t you read anything, Mum? We’re not going outside the EU. We can’t buy Duty Free.’

The doorbell rang and I opened the door to Mick, Jerry’s driver, then raced up the stairs to Tom’s bedroom where I could hear him flinging open drawers. ‘Come on, chop-chop! The plane will go without us!’

‘I’m going as fast as I can, Mummy!’ Spoken with as much sarcasm as can be mustered by an aggrieved eleven-year-old.

He was snuggled in beside me and sucking his thumb when at last we scrunched off down the driveway. I forbore to comment on his outfit of Liverpool T-shirt over khaki bermudas, and glared at Jack to silence him when he raised an eyebrow.

‘Bye-bye, House!’ I whispered, as the gates closed behind us and we headed down the hill towards the village. I say this every time I leave; it’s a superstition I have. I feel, somehow, that Arkady, with its mullioned windows, graceful portico and beautiful gardens, could be a mirage. That if I don’t give it its proper due it won’t be here when I return and I’ll be bounced back to Ballina.

When the estate agent drove me round Howth while I was house-hunting on Jerry’s behalf, she was so garrulously complimentary about every damp-ridden bungalow she showed me that I was beginning to despair. Some were in fine locations with wonderful sea views but would have needed knocking down and rebuilding. Those that were in good repair and attractive in themselves were either hidden in swampy hollows or came with such small plots that a decent garden was out of the question.

At the end of our ‘tour’ we parked in the woman’s Starlet at the summit of Howth Head. Far below us, a car ferry rocked in the wake of a giant container ship as both vessels made their way into Dublin port; overhead, an Aer Lingus plane banked on its approach to the airport. I had sold Jerry on the notion that of all the places available in Dublin, this was where he had to buy, and on that sunny day in winter, Howth, showing its bones in style, confirmed the sale. So much so that I was depressed at the paucity of what was on offer both from this agency and others I had contacted. ‘Is there nothing else?’ I asked the woman.

‘No.’ She peered at her list. ‘Not at the moment, I’m afraid, unless . . .’ She thought a little, then: ‘We’re expecting a house to come in on our books some time this week,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘but we haven’t actually signed it yet and I can’t show it.’

She looked across at me, as though assessing my psychological health. ‘I won’t lie to you, Mrs Butler, it will need a lot of work, and although I don’t have a precise figure yet, of course, it may be a little beyond your budget. But to judge by the way you’ve reacted to what I’ve already shown you, it just might suit you.’

At this point, I thought, I had nothing to lose. ‘Does it have a sea view?’

‘This view. On a clear day as far as Wexford!’ she fired up, and nodded for emphasis, her blonded, lacquered hair retaining the shape ordained for it.

‘Could we just drive by it? So I could get an idea?’

‘Sure, although we won’t exactly be driving by. It’s at the end of a cul-de-sac.’

The gates of Arkady were locked tight with a rusting chain and the enormous sloping garden to the front and sides was seriously overgrown, but on the instant the woman stopped the car, every molecule of my body jumped to attention, and my skin grew tight in an effort to contain the lust to possess this house.

The estate agent did not notice my reaction because she had launched into her spiel and was gazing across me up at the house. ‘It’s an executor’s sale. I haven’t seen it myself, as I said, but I understand, as I’m sure you can see for yourself, Mrs Butler, that it will need work. On the positive side, while the interior is old fashioned and could do with updating, you will find that the roof is sound and that the . . . yakkity-yakkity.’

I didn’t hear anything else. I had stopped listening.

Standing well back above the road, the plain grey façade of Arkady’s three storeys was set with a multiplicity of windows, a few obviously broken, and hung, as far as I could see from this distance, with old-fashioned nets. Its double front door, with an ancient, bleached sun-awning hanging off it in tatters, was set into a wide porch, on each side of which was a specimen-sized box ball, so badly neglected that the clipped shapes had been almost obscured by new shoots. The lawn had reverted, with tall grasses, thistles, nettles, buddleia and two-foot-high scraggly wild flowers fighting for space and winning it from the roses and lupins in what had once been flower-beds.

I loved it. Irrevocably. I cannot explain why, but this decrepit structure, far too large for Jerry’s needs, called to me like a forlorn siren. It took just a nano-second to answer that call, for my brain to calculate how much my own house in Sallynoggin would fetch. I would want to have something to bring to the table when Jerry Brennan and I came to live together in Arkady.

To say I was shocked by the unexpected thought that Jerry Brennan and I would live together is an understatement: up to that moment, I had not realised I had been thinking of a permanent arrangement between us.

In the three months that had elapsed since the concert where we met, we had begun cautiously to date, a concert one week, a play the next, a corporate outing to a race meeting, one or two intimate dinners where the chat was general. We had not slept together although when we said goodnight to each other, despite a tacit understanding that neither of us was looking for a second serious relationship, he had taken to kissing me.

But as I gazed at Arkady, I grasped in this moment of intense, fused life that I, for one, had been wondering where we were headed. During the day, I had found myself looking forward to our outings, thinking about his deep blue eyes and lean frame, and how, when he wasn’t under pressure, he could make me laugh with his dry wit. I had considered the fit: religion (important but not crucial. Church of England folk are generally easy-going and he seemed to have no objections to my Catholicism), money (we were both conservative, he more than I), music. The last was an important bellwether for me, and I was glad to find we had broadly similar tastes: Schoenberg would have been the outer limits of what either of us could tolerate in a symphony. Similarly, our operatic tastes lay broadly within the band called ‘lollipops’ – Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Handel – with the addition of Richard Strauss and Britten. Jerry ventured as far as Wagner, but while I adore the chorus work, the orchestration and some of the lusher scenes in the operas, I find most of the arias and recitatives too dense – and too long.

Actually, the word ‘glad’, used about the discovery of our musical sympathies, is not sufficiently resonant, considering the context. It was more like placing a tick in the positive column of a mental list I now saw I had been compiling. For instance, the ‘respect’ box was ticked positively because I admired his mind: Jerry Brennan was widely read and quick to grasp the most abstruse points of the Irish political system, a labyrinth that defeated many natives. I also admired the way he was driven to achievement by energy and ambition, so unlike the dreamy meandering of my beloved Michael.

Michael’s mind had been so constantly engaged with the past that it frequently excluded the nuts and bolts of the present. He had compulsory mortgage-protection insurance, of course, but it took constant nagging by Daddy for him to make a will. It had turned out to be a three-line affair, hand-written on a piece of lined A4 notepaper, naming me as his executor and stating that his estate was to go to me.

It took a further sustained onslaught from my father to engage Michael sufficiently in the dreariness of taking out life insurance, a task he completed only two months before he died. (Which, of course, led to much questioning by the insurance company while I was still lost in a grief-stricken haze: Had your husband been depressed recently? Was he showing signs of stress? Had he many financial worries?)

All of this flashed through my mind that day, while the estate agent continued to talk about this house I wanted so desperately that I could taste its dust in my mouth. I broke into the sales patter: ‘How much?’

‘I can’t honestly tell you, Mrs Butler, without seeing the interior. One of my colleagues knew the owner and was at a party in that house years ago. It was he who told me we would be getting it from the executors for listing. Six bedrooms and apparently it has a very fine bifurcated staircase. That means—’

‘I know what it means. Give me your best estimate.’

Belatedly, she recognised my fierce interest: her expression changed and she became businesslike. ‘You must understand that whatever figure I give you I can’t be held to it, but I would think – just give me a minute here.’

She turned off the engine of the Starlet and reached into the back seat to retrieve her clipboard. I found the tension almost unbearable as, paging through other properties, she rattled on: ‘You see, I didn’t think you were in the market for such a big house.’ Then, delicately: ‘Will this sale be contingent on your selling a property, Mrs Butler?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

I rolled down my window and watched the bright sea. I had lied. I was sure. I would sell everything I owned to possess this run-down money-trap.

Ostensibly my eyes were fixed on an elongated flock of seagulls wheeling above the wake of a trawler but I wasn’t focused on the aerial ballet. I was busy constructing my own sales pitch to Jerry. Just come out to Howth and have a look, Jerry. I think you’ll be impressed. There are one or two others you should consider as well, of course . . .

That would be a blatant misrepresentation. There were not one or two others to be considered. Arkady was it.

‘About two forty,’ the woman said eventually, bringing me round to look at her again. ‘Now, as I said, I could be wildly off.’ She met my gaze. ‘Of course, you could always make an offer and we could present it to our clients.’

‘Leave it with me,’ I said shortly, disappointment so acute it felt like a fresh wound. My house would fetch only seventy-five or eighty thousand pounds, I knew that. When stamp duty and fees were added, how could I convince Jerry to pay more than two hundred thousands pounds for what, on first sight, I was sure he would think was a dump? (At today’s grossly inflated prices in Dublin, these figures sound ludicrously low, I know, but this was the early nineties, remember.)

The woman was watching me closely as I struggled to prevent this setback showing. ‘Will I telephone you to arrange a viewing?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Fine.’ She scribbled something in her notebook. ‘I have your number. Will your husband be with you?’

She had assumed I was married and I did not disabuse her of the notion. ‘I – I’m not sure.’ The hesitation was minor. I had already recovered my determination and, whatever it cost, I was going to get this house.

‘Fine. No problem.’ She threw the clipboard over her shoulder into the back seat and restarted her engine, smiling at me. ‘It’s women who make these decisions anyway, isn’t it, Mrs Butler? We all know that.’

‘Mmmm . . .’ I smiled back at her and as we drove down the hill towards the village, I looked back over my shoulder. The roof of Arkady stood proudly above its confrères at the height of the road, a galleon in full sail attended by vassal tenders and tugs. ‘Bye-bye, house,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll be back.’

That’s how the leave-taking tradition, or superstition, had begun.

‘Great day for it, Mrs Brennan.’ Jerry’s driver, Mick, was as sunny as always as we bowled down the hill. Good old Mick, seventy if he’s a day but still trying to pretend he’s fifty-nine. The firm should have pensioned him off when he was sixty-five but Jerry saved him. I was glad because it is relaxing to be in his company, perhaps because he never speaks, for good or ill, about anyone in the firm and so, you think, he won’t be talking about you.

In this instance he was right, it was a great day for it, and as the Merc swept along the sea-front, I lowered my window to breathe in the fishy, salt-laden breezes clinking cheerfully through the forest of sunlit yacht riggings in the harbour marina. I had fallen in love with Howth when I was a girl and newly arrived in Dublin and have never for one