Dylan laughed a lot, seemingly genuinely entertained, and Ashling half-fell into the trap of thinking she was a great raconteur. This was all part of the same carry-on as when Dylan had admired her new jacket – his great gift was making people feel good about themselves. He couldn’t help it. Not that it was insincere, Ashling knew. Just a little over-the-top. She shouldn’t make the mistake of telling the same lame-brain stories to other people and expecting similar gales of laughter.

‘Christ, you’re funny.’ He clinked his glass against hers in a toast of praise. His flirtatious manner always implied more than he was prepared to deliver. Not that Ashling took it seriously. At least, not any more.

‘So how’s the computer business?’ she eventually asked.

‘Christ! Insanely busy! We can’t fill orders fast enough.’

‘Wow!’ Ashling shook her head in wonder. ‘When I first met you you weren’t sure if the company would survive the first year. Look at you now!’

The mood hiccupped slightly, almost inpalpably, over the mention of the time they’d first met. But, as luck would have it, they had nearly finished their drinks, so Ashling jumped up. ‘Same again?’

‘Sit down, I’ll get them.’

‘Not at all, I’ll –’

‘Sit down, Ashling, I insist.’

That was another thing about Dylan. He was effortlessly, stylishly generous.

When he returned with the drinks, Ashling asked curiously, ‘So was there a special reason you wanted to meet me…?’

‘Yeeaaahhh,’ Dylan drawled, fiddling with a beermat. ‘Yeah, there was.’ Suddenly he wasn’t at all comfortable, and this in itself was cause for alarm. ‘You haven’t noticed…anything…?’ He stopped and didn’t go on.

‘Anything?’

‘About Clodagh.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘I’m…’ Big, long pause. ‘… kind of worried about her. She never seems happy, she’s often snappy with the children and sometimes even… slightly irrational. Molly accused Clodagh of slapping her and we’ve never slapped the kids.’

Another uncomfortable gap, before Dylan continued. ‘This is probably going to sound stupid, but she’s always doing the house up. No sooner are we finished one room than she’s talking about redoing another. And trying to talk to her about any of this is getting me nowhere. I was wondering… I thought that maybe she might be depressed.’

Ashling considered. Now that she thought about it, Clodagh had seemed dissatisfied and quite difficult lately. She did seem to be doing an excess of decorating. And telling Molly that Barney was dead had struck Ashling as weird. Shocking, even. Although Clodagh’s defence that she had feelings too had seemed reasonable. But now, in the context of Dylan’s concern, it instantly flipped over into being ominous again.

‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ Ashling said, deep in thought. ‘But it’s tough with kids. Very demanding. And if you’re having to work long hours…’

Dylan leant forward, listening intently to Ashling as though her words could be held or collected. But when she trailed away into abject silence, he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this – but I thought that you might know some of the signs. Because of your mother…

‘Your mother?’ he prompted, when Ashling remained mute. ‘She had depression, didn’t she?’

Dylan’s gentleness wasn’t enough to cajole Ashling to speak.

‘And I thought Clodagh might be the same…?’

Suddenly Ashling was back there, mired in the craziness, the bewilderment, the ever-present terror. Her ears rang with long-ago yelling and screaming and her mouth muscles were unresponsive with the desire not to talk about it. Firmly, almost aggressively, she said, ‘Clodagh is nothing like my mother was.’

‘No?’ Dylan’s hope was laced with prurient curiosity.

‘Decorating the front-room isn’t depression. Well, at least it’s not depression as I know it. She’s not refusing to get out of bed? Or wishing she was dead, is she?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not at all. Nothing like that.’

Although her mother hadn’t started off that way. It had been gradual, hadn’t it? Against her will, Ashling lapsed into the past and she became nine years old again, the age she’d been when she’d first realized that something wasn’t quite right. They’d been on their holidays in Kerry when her dad commented on a glorious sunset. ‘A beautiful end to a beautiful day. Isn’t it, Monica?’

Staring straight ahead, Monica had said heavily, ‘Thank God the sun is setting. I want today to be over.’

‘But today was glorious,’ Mike challenged. ‘The sun shone, we played on the beach…’

All Monica said was, ‘I’m ready for today to be over.’

Ashling had paused from fighting with Janet and Owen, feeling excluded and unsettled. Parents weren’t supposed to have feelings, not those sort, anyway. They could complain when you didn’t do your homework or eat your dinner, but they weren’t allowed to have their own private unhappinesses.

At the end of their two weeks away, they came home, and it seemed like one minute her mum was young, pretty and happy, the next she was silent, sunken and had stopped colouring her hair. And she cried. Constantly, silently, just letting tears pour down her face.

‘What’s wrong?’ Mike asked, again and again. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ Ashling asked. ‘Have you a pain in your tummy?’

‘I’ve a pain in my soul,’ she whispered.

‘Take two Junior Disprins.’ Ashling parroted what her mother said to her when she had a pain somewhere.

Other people’s disasters set Monica off. Three solid days were spent crying about a famine in Africa. But when Ashling came home with the joyous news, gleaned from Clodagh’s mother, that ‘they’re sending in food’, Monica had moved on and was now weeping for a baby boy who’d been found in a cardboard box. ‘That poor child,’ she convulsed. ‘That poor, defenceless child.’

While her mother cried, her dad smiled enough for the two of them. Smiled hard. Smiled always. He had a busy and important job. That’s what everyone said to Ashling – ‘Your daddy has a very busy and important job.’ He was a salesman and he made his journeys, from Limerick to Cork, from Cavan to Donegal, sound like the adventures of the Fianna. So busy and important was he that he was often away from Monday to Friday. Ashling was proud of this. Everyone else’s dad came home at half past five every evening, and she couldn’t help scornfully feeling that their jobs mustn’t count for much.