Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

telling me about Heaven. It was never God or Our Lady, I don’t know why. Maybe she wouldn’t have been as comfortable with them. And she had friends from the days when she used to clean the church and from the Sodality and the Third Order of Saint Francis and they were always calling in. And give the priests their due, they brought her back water blessed in Rome and rosary beads from Medjugorje and things like that. And she had money galore, with all you sent her. It wasn’t anyone’s fault what happened to her in the end. Her poor old brain just wore out.’

      ‘That cottage was more than a hundred years old,’ Markey said after lifting his bowed head.

      ‘None of us could get over it,’ Min said. ‘It was the grandest little place. It was always warm in there, no matter what it was like outside. Is there any more tea?’

      ‘Two-foot walls,’ Markey said.

      ‘I can see why a Protestant would have wanted to escape out of there, all the same,’ I remarked.

      They both looked at me coolly.

      Markey was so strikingly handsome that nearly everyone who passed the booth looked back at him and then at her, a small woman with silver and grey hair piled up in a haphazard cottage-loaf above a face alight with response. The pair of them were having a great time bantering about Kilbride, the way it used to be when there were hardly any cars and the milk was delivered in rattling bottles and the bread van did the rounds.

      He’s so much more relaxed with her than with me, I thought. Seated close to her. Laughing with pleasure at her. Maybe he savoured a woman of his mother’s generation? Or maybe he remembered how he and I had nearly been a couple and that made him wary of me still.

      He must have known, the day we went walking down to the Pigeon House, that it would devastate me to be told that he was leaving Ireland – and not sometime in the future, but that very night. Maybe that was why he was being so nice to me about this inspirational booklet idea. Maybe he wanted to make up for that great hurt. Like I’d said in my first ‘Thought’, miracles of restitution offer themselves in middle age.

      ‘Rosie’s going to write a little book about how to make the most of the middle part of life,’ Markey was telling her, full of enthusiasm.

      ‘She’s what?’ Min said. ‘Rosie is?’ She surveyed me sternly. ‘Sure what does she know about it? She’s only a young one.’

      ‘Can’t I find out from you?’ I smiled at her.

      ‘Yes, now’s your chance, Min,’ Markey said to her. ‘What do you think about middle age? Compared, say, to being decidedly young or definitely old?’

      But Min couldn’t rise to the change of subject. Jetlag had caught up with her, and I could see she wanted to bow out of the evening. ‘I was nearly a writer myself, once,’ she said vaguely. ‘I lived in a house that James Joyce the writer lived in. The first time I was ever in Dublin, the bus from the country stopped in Rathmines which I thought was the middle of Dublin so I asked the driver to let me off and there was a sign in the window saying “Room to Let”. So I had a room there for a few days when the baby’ – she gestured abstractly towards me – ‘was still in the hospital. Anyway, there was writing on a stone outside my window which said that James Joyce had lived there between when he was two and five. So I often thought, he must have learned to write while he lived there. He couldn’t have been a writer if he didn’t learn to write. And if I’d have written anything when I was staying there, I’d have been a writer too.’