He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle and blinked at me through the lenses. “I have always accepted,” he said simply, “that there is a price to pay.”

“For what?” I said. “What do you want?”

Daniel considered this-not the answer itself, I think, but how best to explain it to me-in silence. “At first,” he said eventually, “it was more a matter of what I didn’t want. Well before I finished college, it had become clear to me that the standard deal-a modicum of luxury, in exchange for one’s free time and comfort-wasn’t for me. I was happy to live frugally, if that was what it took, in order to avoid the nine-to-five cubicle. I was more than willing to sacrifice the new car and the sun holidays and the-what are those things?-the iPod.”

I was on the edge of my nerves already, and the thought of Daniel on a beach in Torremolinos, drinking a technicolor cocktail and bopping along to his iPod, almost made me lose it. He glanced up at me with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, no. But what I failed to take into account is that no man is an island; that I couldn’t simply opt out of the prevailing mode. When a specific deal becomes standard throughout a society-reaches critical mass, so to speak-no alternatives are readily available. Living simply isn’t actually an option these days; either one becomes a worker bee, or one lives on toast in a wretched bedsit with fourteen students directly overhead, and I wasn’t particularly taken with that idea either. I did try it for a while, but it was practically impossible to work with all the noise, and the landlord was this sinister old countryman who kept coming into the flat at the oddest hours and wanting to chat, and… well, anyway. Freedom and comfort are at a high premium just now. If you want those, you have to be willing to pay a correspondingly high price.”

“Didn’t you have other options?” I said. “I thought you had money.”

Daniel gave me a fishy stare; I gave him a bland one back. Eventually he sighed. “I believe I’d like a drink,” he said. “I think I left-Yes, here it is.” He had leaned sideways to feel under the bench, and I was braced and ready before I knew it-there was nothing handy that could make a weapon, but if I whipped ivy in his face, it might give me enough of a start to get to the mike and yell for backup-but he came back up with a half-full whiskey bottle. “I brought it out here last night, and then forgot it in all the excitement. And there should be-Yes.” He brought out a glass. “Will you have some?”

It was good stuff, Jameson’s Crested Ten, and God knows I could have used a drink. “No, thanks,” I said. No unnecessary risks; this guy was a whole lot smarter than your average bear.

Daniel nodded, examined the glass and bent to rinse it in the trickle of water. “Have you ever considered,” he inquired, “the sheer level of fear in this country?”

“Not on a regular basis,” I said. I was having a hard time keeping track of the thread of this conversation, but I knew Daniel well enough to know that he was going somewhere with this and he would get there in his own sweet time. We had maybe forty-five minutes before Fauré ran out, and I’ve always been good at letting the suspect run the show. No matter how strong you are or how controlled, keeping a secret-I should know-gets heavy after a while, heavy and tiring and so lonely it feels lethal. If you let them talk, all you need to do is nudge them now and then, keep them pointing in the right direction; they’ll do the rest.

He shook water droplets off the glass and pulled out his handkerchief again, to dry it. “Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power-governments, employers-exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient-not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who-either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe-are free from fear.”

He poured himself three fingers of whiskey. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a hero,” he said, “and I don’t consider myself to be insane. I don’t think any of the others are either of those things. And yet I wanted us all to have that chance at freedom.” He put the bottle down and glanced across at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”

The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me. “It doesn’t seem like very much to ask,” I said.

“Oh, but it was,” Daniel said, and took a swallow of his drink. There was a rough edge to his voice. “It was a lot to ask. It followed, you see, that what we needed was safety-permanent safety. Which brings us back to your last question. My parents left investments that provide me with a small income-ample in the 1980s, now hardly enough for that bedsit. Rafe’s trust fund gives him roughly the same amount. Justin’s allowance will end as soon as he finishes his PhD; so will Abby’s student grants, and Lexie’s would have too. How many jobs do you think are available, in Dublin, for people who want only to study literature and to be together? In a few months, we would have been in precisely the same situation as the vast majority in this country: caught between poverty and slavery, two paychecks from the street, in thrall to the whims of landlords and employers. Perennially afraid.”

He looked out through the ivy, up the grass to the patio, tilting his wrist slowly so that the whiskey slid circles round the glass. “All we needed,” he said, “was a home.”

“That’s enough safety?” I asked. “A house?”

“Well, of course,” he said, a little surprised. “Psychologically, the difference it makes is almost inexpressible. Once you own your home, free and clear, what is there left for anyone-landlords, employers, banks-to threaten you with? What hold does anyone have over you? One can do without practically anything else, if necessary. We would always be able to scrape together enough money for food, between us, and there is no other material fear as primal or as paralyzing as the thought of losing one’s home. With that fear eliminated, we would be free. I’m not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”

He must have read the look on my face. “We’re in Ireland, for heaven’s sake,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “If you know any history at all, what could possibly be clearer? The one crucial thing the British did was to claim the land as their own, to turn the Irish from owners into tenants. Once that was done, then everything else followed naturally: confiscation of crops, abuse of tenants, eviction, emigration, famine, the whole litany of wretchedness and serfdom, all inflicted casually and unstoppably because the dispossessed had no solid ground on which to stand and fight. I’m sure my own family was as guilty as any. There may well be an element of poetic justice in the fact that I found myself looking at the other side of the coin. But I didn’t feel the need simply to accept it as my just deserts.”