Sandra flashed an uneasy look at me, the first time I’d seen her furtive or defensive. She took a long hit on her drink, which was heavy on the Tanqueray, and brandished the green bottle at me. I took it and made my own. When Sandra looked up again, her gaze was steady.

“They’ve had a rough time of it over the years, Ed, both Jonny and Em. I know, silver spoon, everything money can buy, everyone should have their troubles, but really, they shouldn’t.”

“Why shouldn’t they? Tell me their troubles.”

“Jonny’s father died when he was eleven. Richard O’Connor was my first husband. He was a doctor-he was the one who helped me believe in myself, in my father’s legacy-because I hadn’t gone into medicine myself, I felt unworthy, I had been teaching in Castlehill College, drifting, really, but he gave me focus-he reminded me I was my father’s daughter. And I took over the running of the Howard Maternity Center, and I founded the Howard Clinic and the Howard Nursing Home, assembled the investors, saw them built and open and running successfully.”

Sandra got up suddenly and turned all the lights out and beckoned me across the room to the great window.

“You can just about make the three towers out through the mist, see? I hope one day to see a fourth.”

Three great blurs of light were discernible, shimmering in the murk. I looked at Sandra, straight-backed, regal. Her eyes were shining with pride, and something that looked like defiance, or triumph, and something else, a shadow, a sudden darkness that appeared from nowhere and was just as briskly dispelled.

“He said I did it all myself, but of course I didn’t, it was Dr. Rock-that’s what everyone called him, Richard O’Connor, R-O-C-he inspired me, Ed, just like my own father had inspired me, and Rock inspired Jonny too, he-you know when Jonny was eleven, he played rugby, played very well, he was a prospect, insofar as you can be at that age, but to look at him now, well, you couldn’t imagine it, could you?”

I shook my head.

“Rock had played, and he coached at Seafield and even in the school. And I’m not like Shane, I’m not saying rugby is some kind of universal panacea, but-sometimes a father can be so important, so inspiring, that when he dies it’s like the air has gone out of the world. I think that’s what happened for Jonny. And Denis didn’t get to know him until later. In fairness, Jonny’s started to get along really well with Denis since he went to college. He really goes for the whole legal Caesar bit. It’s me and Denis who don’t get along so well anymore.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Are you separating?”

“I think so. Mutually. Amicably. We’ve just…run out of…”

She exhaled, smiling, and shrugged, and waved a hand in the air. I didn’t smile back.

“I don’t think it’s having an effect on Jonathan, if that’s what you meant,” she said.

“It wasn’t. You were going to tell me about Emily. Her troubles.”

“Emily-oh Jesus, Emily.”

She walked across to the fire, where she stood, staring into the flames. I stayed by the window. I could see the fire reflected in the glass, flickering red in the black.

“Emily’s mother, Jessica-you met her, didn’t you?”

“This morning, yes.”

“How did she strike you?”

“Initially, very sexy, maybe a bit too flirtatious, a bit blatant. A bit much. And then…I don’t know, like she was at one remove from herself…like she was damaged.”

Sandra stared into the fire and breathed out slowly.

“Damaged…‘damaged’ is a good word. Jessica’s mother died of ovarian cancer when she was six. She was an only child. Her father was a not terribly successful actor, and the heavy drinking that usually goes along with the theater got much worse after his wife’s death. And Jessica looked after him. Made his breakfast, ironed his clothes, made sure he was on time for rehearsals. She was his little wife. Her periods started early, when she was about eleven; at twelve, she’d reached full sexual maturity. At least, her body had. And her father noticed. And Jessica noticed him noticing, and began to use makeup, and to dress so he’d go on noticing. And one night when he lumbered in from the pub after whatever play he was in, or wasn’t in, drunk again, she was waiting for him in the marital bed…his patient little wife, all ready for love…and he tried to resist, but, as with the drink and the failure, he didn’t try hard enough.”

Her voice had thickened with emotion; now it faltered. The fire crackled and hissed. I stood dead still, as if moving might break the spell, as if we were at a séance, and Sandra was communing with the departed. She glanced quickly over her shoulder at me, and I saw her eyes were glistening. There was nothing I could say, and before I had a chance to think of something, she turned back to the fire and continued.

“She told me all about it one night, early in the marriage. She’d had a row with Shane-over sex, how she wanted it more than he did, or how he had accused her of cheating with her leading man: young love, high drama, and she arrived up here and we drank brandy, and she told me all about it. How it lasted eighteen months or so, until she was fourteen. By then she had started sleeping around-older boys at school, a couple of her friends’ fathers. And her own father had fallen apart under the strain, the shame of it all. Spent time in mental hospital. And drying out, though as soon as he’d get out, the drinking would start again. Whiskey, at the end. And Jessica running wild now, expelled from school, and no one to care for her-there was an aunt, on her mother’s side, in Clontarf, but she didn’t want to know. And the father died, pancreatitis, I think, or maybe liver, a drink death anyway, and Jessica was left, sixteen, all alone, desperate, afraid. Taken into foster care, ran away, one, two, three families. And finally the social worker in charge of her case, despairing, took a flier, had the inspired idea of encouraging her to act. She got in touch with some of Jessica’s father’s former colleagues, the employable ones, and they were all stricken with guilt and ‘there but for the grace go I’ sentimentality and they got her some walk-ons and a few auditions and she turned out to be a natural. I suppose you could say the theater saved Jessica’s life.”

Sandra turned and faced me, and I could see the glow of the fire in her red hair and the pity in her green eyes.

“But those eighteen months, Ed…herself and her father, and Jessica just twelve, thirteen years old…alone in the house, her father’s little wife…I don’t think she ever moved on from there. From what Shane said-and I know she’s been unfaithful to him throughout their marriage-she doesn’t much enjoy sex, but she likes the power it gives her.”

“And Emily…” I said.

“And Emily,” she said. “Her mother’s daughter. Emily and Jonathan. Shane didn’t know, and Jessica didn’t know, but I knew, I think I’ve always known. Is that what Jonny was so excited about, that I might find out?”

I nodded.

“The weird thing is-the awful thing, maybe-I never felt it was wrong. I mean, kids are going to do it, thirteen, fourteen, you can try and delay, but by sixteen most of them are having sex, and as a parent what are you going to do? Tell them not to? Or pretend they aren’t? I mean, it’s good, isn’t it? If you do it right? And if they experiment together, if it’s not an older person taking advantage of them.”

“I think some people might feel a little uneasy at their being cousins.”

“It’s not brother and sister. It’s not an incestuous relationship. The taboo about cousins marrying, reproducing, is based on the fear that they’ll keep doing it, and that the children of extended families of married cousins will marry each other. Then you have a problem.”

“I doubt if your brother would be so sanguine.”

“I don’t know that I’m sanguine about it either, Ed. I’m just saying I never felt it was wrong. Maybe that says as much about me as it does about anyone else. I mean, Jonny’s been in therapy since shortly after Rock’s death. And Emily-this is something else her father doesn’t know-Emily has been seeing the same therapist for years too. She came to me, I set it up for her. So…and no, I don’t believe there should be a stigma attached to it, but I’m old-fashioned enough to wish our kids didn’t need it. So sanguine isn’t close to how I feel.”