She should have dressed down on her visits, to try to narrow the gap. But she needed as much stuff as possible, to wear like a suit of armour, so that she couldn’t be sucked back in, subsumed by her past.

She hated it all, then hated herself.

‘Why don’t you come and see me?’ Lisa asked. If they wouldn’t make the half-hour train journey from Hemel Hempstead to London they were hardly likely to fly to Dublin.

‘But with your Dad not being well and…’

When Clodagh woke on Sunday morning she was mildly hung-over, but in great form. Briefly at liberty to snuggle up to Dylan and ignore his erection with a clean conscience.

When Molly and Craig appeared, Dylan urged them sleepily, ‘Go downstairs and break things, and let Mummy and me have a snooze.’

Amazingly they left, and Clodagh and Dylan drifted in and out of sleep.

‘You smell lovely,’ Dylan mumbled into Clodagh’s hair. ‘Like biscuits. All sweet and… sweet

Some time later she whispered to him, ‘I’ll give you a million pounds if you get me some breakfast.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Coffee and fruit.’

Dylan left and Clodagh stretched like a contented starfish across the bed until he reappeared with a mug in one hand and a banana in the other. He placed the banana on his groin facing downwards, then when Clodagh looked, he faked a gasp and swung the banana upwards, like a quivering erection. ‘Why Mrs Kelly,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re beautiful!’

Clodagh laughed, but felt the familiar guilt begin its relentless creep.

Later they went out for lunch, to one of those places that didn’t make you feel like outcasts for bringing along two young children. Dylan went to procure a cushion for Molly to sit on, and as Clodagh wrestled a knife out of Molly’s hand she caught a glimpse of Dylan chatting persuasively with a waitress – a Bambi-limbed teenager – who flushed at her proximity to such a good-looking man.

That good-looking man was her husband, Clodagh realized, and suddenly, oddly, she barely recognized him. Assailed by that weird see-saw feeling of knowing someone so well that out of nowhere she didn’t know him at all. Familiarity generally dulled the impact of his sunny blond hair, the smile that rippled his skin into layers of parentheses around his mouth, the hazel eyes which were nearly always full of fun. She was surprised and unsettled by his beauty.

What was it Ashling had said yesterday? Recapture the magic.

Her mind produced an image: she was panting with desire, her groin swollen with want, being laid back in the sand… Sand? No, hold on a minute, that wasn’t Dylan, that was Jean-Pierre, the knee-tremblingly seductive Frenchman whom she’d lost her virginity to. God, she sighed, that had been brilliant. Eighteen, hostelling along the French Riviera, he’d been the sexiest man she’d ever clapped eyes on. And she had very high standards, she’d never so much as kissed any of the boys she hung around with at home. But the minute she’d seen Jean-Pierre’s intense moody stare, beautiful sulky mouth and loose Gallic body-language she’d decided that he was the one who’d receive the highly prized gift of her virginity.

Back to Dylan, the early magic. Ah yes. She remembered almost being in tears as she begged him to do her. ‘I can’t wait, oh please put it in now!’ Sliding along the back seat of his car, letting her knees fall apart… No, wait, that hadn’t been Dylan either. That had been Greg, the American football player who’d been on a year’s scholarship to Trinity. Too bad she’d met him only three months before he went back. He’d been a handsome, sure-of-himself jock, bulky with muscle, and for some reason she’d found him completely irresistible.

Of course she’d felt like that about Dylan too. She rummaged in her past for specific memories and dusted off her favourite. The first time she’d ever seen him. Their eyes had – literally – met across a crowded room and before she’d learnt the first thing about him, she’d known everything she needed to know.

Five years older than Clodagh, he made all the other boys look like spotty, wet-behind-the-ears youths. There was a sureness and an urbane confidence about him that rendered him utterly charismatic. He smiled, he charmed, his very presence was warming, uplifting – and reassuring: even though his business was only starting up she had cast-iron faith that Dylan would always make everything all right. And he was so yummy!

She was twenty years of age, dazzled by his blond good looks and giddy with her good fortune. He was so right for her that there was no doubt but that he was the one she was going to marry. Even when her parents had insisted that she was too young to know her own mind, she’d scorned their advice. Dylan was the one for her, she was the one for Dylan.

‘There you go, Molly!’ He was back with the cushion that three teenage girls had fought over giving to him. It was only then that Clodagh noticed that Molly had poured half the salt into the sugar bowl.

After lunch they drove to the beach. It was a bright, blustery day, just warm enough to take off their shoes and paddle in the waves. Dylan got a man walking his dog to take a photo of the four of them clustered together against the clean, empty sand, smiling as the wind whipped their flaxen hair across their faces, Clodagh clasping one side of her skirt to keep it from sticking to her wet legs.

8

Lisa showed up for work at eight o’clock on Monday morning. Start as you mean to go on. But to her disgust the building was locked. She hung around in the damp air for a while and eventually went to get a cup of coffee. Even that took some doing. It wasn’t like London where coffee emporia had their doors open at the break of day.

At nine o’lock, when she left the coffee shop, it had started to rain. Her arm over her hair, she hurried along, her four-inch heels skidding on the slick pavement. Suddenly she halted and heard herself screeching at a passing young man in an anorak, ‘Does it always rain in this naffing country?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, nervously. ‘I’m only twenty-six.’

At the front-door Lisa was greeted by a girl called Trix. She was a rash of goosepimples in a little see-through slip-dress and was jigging from high clumpy foot to high clumpy foot to keep warm. When she saw Lisa, her face lit with admiration and she hastily ground her cigarette out.

‘Howya,’ she growled, exhaling her last plume of smoke. ‘Killer shoes! I’m Trix, your PA. Before you ask, my name is Patricia, but there’s no point calling me that because I won’t answer to it. I was Trixie until the people two doors up got a poodle by the same name, so now I’m Trix. I used to be the receptionist and general dogsbody but I’ve been promoted, thanks to you. Mind you, they haven’t replaced me… Over here, the lift is this way.