1995
When the fight comes, it's about Mrs D. We're sitting over the remains of dinner, darkness bulked against the glass walls of Maeve's dining room. Donal has gone to the gym, Ria is in bed, Maeve is finishing a bottle of wine and, since the others left, we have been fixed on the topic of our mother.
"How much of her pain was in her situation," I ask, "and how much in her person? That's what I could never work out. If she didn't have Daddy and all-that-had-been-done-to-her to complain about, I still don't think she'd have been happy."
"She was happy after Daddy died. You didn't know her then."
"I did. Daddy was dead a year, I seem to recall, when she kicked me out of the house."
"She did not kick you out, you walked. And in that first year, she wasn't herself...Naturally. Afterwards
