When they married seven years before she loved him, the way people do; then she began not to love him and now she disliked him so much she could not believe that she had ever loved him at all. He was weak, forgetful, happy when he got a new shirt, scared to go out in the garden after dark to get coal, mean about food bills, extravagant in pubs, a bully, a charmer. That was why she came back to find the other man, her old sweetheart, the sandy-haired boy whom she knew for a few nights and had danced with, and had kissed under a hollowed poplar outside her lodgings in Dublin. They were both students at the time, though he never qualified. He became a folk singer and was famous in America. She engineered it that she and her husband would come for a holiday to this place where her sweetheart was born. It was easy to achieve. They needed a holiday. She was sick, she said, of telephones and doorbells and the budgie they kept in a cage and the meat bills regularly once a month.

‘Book somewhere,’ her husband said. ‘We have money, we can afford it.’

So, she booked at this seaside town in the west of Ireland hoping that since it was summer he might be on holiday. Her hope was realized. The first evening they arrived she heard from the hotel owner that he was home but she hadn’t seen him yet. Perhaps today? As least, she looked pretty. Her dark hair being long made her seem a lot less than thirty and from the wind and breeze her eyes glowed the way used to, when she was a girl and eager to fall in love.