Well, there was nothing else for it. Just as the Welsh rabbit was mooted, with a surprising degree of appreciation – ‘That’d be fucking delicious,’ Wilson said, ‘excusing my French’ – the storm added to its wretched fervour in an attempt to turn the coast of Dalkey into the foot of Cape Horn. Wilson didn’t say anything about it directly, but the storm was in the room, sound-wise. He was staring, with the wide, moist eyes of a mere child. Not staring at anything, just staring. Like the storm frightened him. Tom suddenly felt fatherly towards him. Senior officer. He felt he was obliged – and he was, of course he was, though he might well regret it – to accommodate them for the night.

As he melted the Welsh rabbit he was content that neither of the boys came to assist him. The grill was a mystery unto itself. Like a damp, evil grotto. He was always meaning to get down on his knees and get at it with a cloth and a lash of soap, but maybe the horrors were best left alone, after all this time. Years ago he might have thoughtlessly lifted a bit of the grease with a knife and spread it on his bread, but never now, as he had no wish to awaken another ulcer. Let sleeping ulcers lie, without grease to stir them into life. The lack of oven cleaning was just one of those original sins that bothered him as an undercurrent to his passages through the kitchen. He felt he owed it to Mr Tomelty somehow, but that wasn’t a clear thought. And Winnie might give him an awful stare about such things into the bargain. Including ‘the state of the jacks’, as she put it. ‘Could you not keep a bottle of bleach handy?’ she would say, in her hopeless, loving tone. But well he knew how little the pollock, the eels and the sand dabs would appreciate bleach, and wasn’t every bit of moisture he produced in the flat going down the pipes and under the garden and straight out into the murderous waters at the back? It was bad enough that they had to swim through everything else. Turds and whatnot, God knew. When Winnie swam off the little concrete jetty, the rare time, she called it ‘going through the motions’. Oh she was witty, she was clever. College. Law degree. His pride. She flamed through the first year, her mother died, she emptied out somehow, she pushed on emptily, she graduated, dressed in her finery, in her grief. It was as if she needed nothing then because she had nothing. Nothing but himself and Joseph, and the same Joseph soon to be far away. The only thing she ever mentioned after that was a husband, as in, she did not have one. Perhaps that was a small thing.

Wilson ate his rabbit with the trust of a man who had never looked into the grill. O’Casey approached it more circumspectly. His instincts were more honed, Tom thought, watching him, with a feeling bordering on fondness. Even commiseration. The younger man sniffed it delicately, smiling so as to give no offence to the chef.

‘Arra,’ he said, ‘not so bad, Mr Kettle …’

He whitened a little, but set into it manfully.

Winnie had never risen to an actual compliment about his cooking because truth to tell it wasn’t cooking. Sustenance, survival, at best. He wondered briefly would they have been as kind about the lump of cold hash in the weeping pot – winter was condensing, interestingly, from a scientific point of view, on its outer aluminium walls. Praise always roused in him an inconvenient sense of ambition for further heights. Even praise laced with irony. Ridiculous. The Welsh rabbit was a childish dish, although in his own youth Easi-Singles had not yet been invented, much less the anaemic shovel-blades of bread which the yellow squares had obediently melted on. It was a very uncheeselike yellow, God’s truth. Not so long ago he had penetrated bravely into the National Gallery. He was of the opinion that retired men should try and broaden their minds, so calcified by narrow work and general shrinkage. Anyway, he had the Free Travel Pass and it seemed churlish not to use it now and then. So in he scooted just the odd time to town, forsaking his solitude, in search of amplitude, of healing even, on the 8 bus. He had wandered about the labyrinth of sombre paintings, through the deserted marble halls, awed, diminished and silenced – he had to point himself discreetly into an alcove to belch, after a beef sandwich in Bewley’s – and eventually came by chance on a tiny picture. You came on everything good by chance. He liked it for its modesty among the bigger efforts. Like a human soul should be in the world, among elephants, galaxies. A miniature ‘rural scene’. Pissarro, said the label. And he stared at it, feeling a sudden furious gratitude, his mind entered by thoughts of France and the French countryside, where he had never been, wondering what the curious molten yellow of a little square wheat field reminded him of – he was back down on Merrion Square before it hit him. Easi-Singles. He had considered his mind duly broadened.

Oh, then on to his real favourite, the Natural History Museum further up the square. The ribs and bones of the Great Irish elk that roamed no more in Ireland, the blue whale suspended above in its own great corset of bones, the ironwork of the stairs and upper galleries like the vast skeleton of an even bigger whale, all about and above him, a whale inside a whale then, making of him a double Jonah – oh blessed, sacred place.

O’Casey, confessing to an ulcer himself, rose immediately after finishing the Welsh rabbit and stood at the beauty board, leaning against it in alarm – you could see it buckling slightly – his face turned away as if in disgrace, like a punished scholar. His right hand went to his forehead and he seemed to be sweating. ‘What’s the what’s-a?’ he muttered, in an orgy of growing suffering. And he fluttered his right hand on his forehead, in a continuous display, as if his hand were going to take off, catastrophically, like a one-winged pigeon. Then he spent the following half-hour in the jacks, which is a long time in another person’s toilet, somehow. As Mr Tomelty’s builders had not gone to town on the thickness of the walls, his distress and battle stations were clear throughout. There were groans and almost savage expostulations, and O’Casey’s god was summoned to assist him. For this half-hour, as the winds battered the castle, and the rain sat upright on the windowpanes, Wilson smiled and hemmed, and laughed aloud now and then, perfectly at his ease, his stomach full. Tom was entranced again – he liked friendship expressed openly. They were like soldiers in a trench, he thought, everything raw and out in the open, bare humanity. Yes, it thrilled him. He exulted suddenly again in the presence of these young men, much as he feared them and their words. The mateyness between Wilson and O’Casey, proven now in the cauldron of the one’s distress, the caldera rather, the poor man’s guts surging with the lava of the Welsh rabbit, put Tom again on the cusp of weeping. Could he speak of love, could he speak of the saving graces of men? No, speechifying was not a feature of this moment, or any, or few, among mere males. He must accept that, reluctantly. Instead, he fetched an old tin of stomach powders he had used himself in such extremities, and handed it in, just the one hand and the tin thrust through the door, not violating O’Casey’s important privacy. The tin was taken delicately, not violently, like a well-trained dog taking a morsel from human fingers.

In a while there was a final explosion, then a dramatic crying out, then a silence, then the chain solemnly flushed. O’Casey, pale, altered, trembling from his glad release from pain, walked slowly back into the room, Wilson beaming and nodding, O’Casey throwing the whole thing off with humility and grace. And Tom, feeling suddenly a little removed from their nice accord, maybe as a consequence of his age, wandered off into his bedroom to fetch the lilo from the little cupboard. This item of furniture had belonged to some simple cottage, he was sure, a rough, local artefact that had never seen a shop. The insides of the doors were covered in newspaper from August 1942, with advertisements for fascinators and fedoras, and war news, democratically, and now redundantly, featured. Only the passing spiders and clothes moths, and his distracted gaze, could read it now. The lilo was Winnie’s bed when she visited and he was well used to fitting it out with her cut-down sheets and a feather pillow in an impressively embroidered case, the work of yet another unknown rural hand. The best things in Ireland were the work of unknown hands. And oftentimes the worst crimes.

He wasn’t sure what O’Casey and Wilson could do with just one lilo, but there was always the short couch at a pinch, and because indeed he felt some panic over this, and a sense of crisis as a host, he placed the lilo and the sheets and the pillow in a little heap, and nodded his head with the sagacity of Archimedes, as if it were clear to all that everyone was accommodated, though he didn’t think they were. But he had done his best, his best, and he had put the grub into them, and now he had grown weary, weary, and with a few last words as simple and worn as old pennies he went to his doss. He was up the few times in the night, what with the dicky bladder, but otherwise slept like Dracula in his clay.