‘What’s eating you?’ her husband said.

‘Oh God, haven’t I told you?’ she cried. ‘Haven’t I told you every day for the past six weeks that I’ve got to a certain stage in a woman’s life? I’ve told you I’d be all touchy. All women are touchy now. I keep you, Desmond, in my mind’s eye. I keep knowing the next thing you’re going to say. Desmond?’

‘Look, I have to get back to the desk –’

‘I was washing the dishes and the wireless was on. I was going through figures in my head and the next thing was the telephone rang. I knew it’d be you, Desmond. When you were talking I thought of the time you put up the garden shed and the time you said a concreted yard was there for ever, and the day you took the chair back. D’you remember in Chapelizod when you said I had the nicest hands you’d ever seen? You’re asking me to carry buckets of blood, Desmond. You’re telling me to go into a butcher’s and –’

‘I can’t hear a damn word you’re saying. Are you sick, girl?’

In the hall she shook her head. She held back her sobs. His voice questioned her again, and she said again that she was upset. She said she was fifty-one years of age and had borne no children. She said that for some reason she couldn’t bear the thought of his growing tomatoes in his field. She said that for some reason she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him on his bicycle.