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Billy?’
    Andrew’s face closed. ‘Don’t even ask.’ He dropped the butt of his cigarette into the dregs of his coffee. ‘I’d best get back to the books.’
    I was still very young then and I think I found it hard to imagine a family so unlike my own. My own background amazed Andrew, as it was to amaze Lucy and, in due course, a great many other people; and to begin with, this amazed me. At that time I thought my own family one of the most unremarkable there could be. I was the youngest of seven. The eldest was the priest, Fr Tom, and most of the siblings in between were already married with children of their own by the time I went to university. It all added up to a great warm web of people, sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, nieces and nephews, like some vast, complex soap opera but without the rows and the tension, without the violence and drama. They all still lived in the remote part of Northern Ireland where we had grown up and where my father worked a small farm. My family lived in scattered bungalows, or in semi-detached houses in estates at the edges of small market towns. They worked as teachers and as bank clerks, as nurses and minor civil servants. Two of my sisters stayed at home to look after their babies, and they helped mind the children of the other women in the family who went out to work. They all lived in each other’s pockets, helping each other out, going to the pub together and to football matches, babysitting for each other, giving each other lifts here and there. At the time all this seemed perfectlynormal to me. I was unaware that elsewhere in Western Europe, even in Ireland, the nuclear family was shrinking in on itself, as its emotional temperature plummeted.
    Of all my brothers and sisters, I’ve always been closest to Tom, even though he’s sixteen years older than me. Sometimes when we’re all together again, at Christmas lunch or a family birthday, we’ll look down the table at each other and suddenly connect. Over the shouting and roaring, the clash of cutlery and babies bawling, I see Tom and I as contained together in a private silence. Although we may not have what the others have, we know something that they don’t. When I think of Tom, most often that’s how I imagine him, smiling at me, complicit.
    It was Tom who introduced me to the theatre. When I was twelve, he insisted, in the face of my mother’s opposition, on taking me to Belfast to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream . ‘It’ll be money down the drain. How could a child like that understand Shakespeare?’ my mother said.
    â€˜She might, she might not,’ was Tom’s mild reply. ‘At the very least it’ll be an outing for her and company for me.’
    In the car on the way to the city, he broadly outlined the story of the play, and this helped me to follow the action on stage. But my mother was right, there was much I didn’t understand, and it was precisely this that drew me in. Certainly I was dazzled by the costumes and the lights, as any child might be, by the idea of actors and the whole strange world of the theatre. But it was the language that enchanted me most. I loved its blunt truth: I am as ugly as a bear , its richly visual quality, that called forth images even more vivid and real to me than the softly glittering scene before my eyes.
    I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
    Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
    Afterwards, Tom loaned me his Complete Works of Shakespeare , with its Bible-fine pages. I looked up the text, these words, words, words that I had seen translated into the extraordinary experience of a few days earlier. Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.
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    I knew that by this time I should go upstairs and get to work, but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Instead, I made