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another cup of coffee and took it out to the back garden. The fake cow stared at me blankly. Molly had told me that there was a hedgehog living somewhere in the flower borders, much to her delight. ‘Why are we always so pleased when we see a hedgehog?’ she said. She had always thought of them as slow creatures, she told me, but that this one could move remarkably swiftly when it had a mind to do so.
    One of the strange things about really old friendships is that the past is both important and not important. Taking the quality of the thing as a given – the affection, the trust – the fact that I had known both Molly and Andrew for over twenty years gave my relationships with them more weight and significance than friendships of, say, three or four years’ standing. And yet we rarely spoke to each other of the past, of our lives and experiences during that long period of time. To do so would have been in many instances mortifying. Andrew once said to me, ‘You have the most extraordinary memory,’ to which I replied, ‘I’m very good at forgetting things too,’ and he responded, without missing a beat, ‘I’m glad to hear it.’
    During my first year at college, for example, I frequently went home at the weekends, because I still had a boyfriend in the north, someone with whom I had been going out since I was sixteen. Henry, his name was. He was studying in Belfast at the time; he was going to be a maths teacher. My family was extremely fond of him, and a significant part of those weekends home consisted of him sitting on our sofa with my nephews and nieces crawling all over him; or drinking cups of tea and talking to my brothers about hurling. ‘Sounds like he’s practically one of the family already,’ Andrew said after I’d been talking to him about a recent visit. ‘Your Ma probably thinks you’re going to marry him.’ Marry! Marry Henry, of all people! I actually laughed in Andrew’s face when he said this, but, ‘Think about it,’ he replied. I did, later, and realised with horror (the word is not too strong here) that Andrew was correct. The pattern of my relationship with Henry was exactly that of my sisters when they had been going out with the men who were now their husbands, and there most probably was an unspoken understanding all round that we too would eventually get married and live locally. How could I not have seen it before now?
    I dumped Henry suddenly, brutally, the following weekend. To be sure of a complete break I told him I’d been two-timing him for almost a whole term with someone in Dublin, and he was suitably, understandably, hurt. ‘What’s this man’s name then?’ he asked me coldly, and I almost spoiled it, almost blurted out, ‘I don’t know.’ Henry’s pain was nothing compared to my mother’s anger. ‘I don’t know what kind of airs and graces you’re getting about yourself at that university, madam, that the likes of Henry isn’t good enough for you now. Leading him on likethat, what must he think of us?’ By Sunday night, my mother and I were barely speaking to each other.
    Back in Dublin the following day, a look of alarm crossed Andrew’s face when I told him what I’d done. ‘It’s nothing you said,’ I hastily told him, which wasn’t true, and ‘It’s a huge relief to me,’ which was. And then, to my surprise, I began to cry, the first tears I’d shed over the whole affair. Andrew reacted with blokish unease in the first instance – lit me a cigarette, hadn’t a clue what to say – but in the following days he consoled me. At his suggestion we went to a pub together one evening, something we hadn’t done before. I told him I felt guilty about what had happened because I should have seen it coming. I had always known that I was something of a misfit in the family, but the visceral