‘Stream of what?’ Sarah Connolly asked in a pained voice.

Whenever Izzy had seen Sarah before, she was never with her husband, and when she’d seen her husband, he was usually with another woman.

‘Stream of consciousness – I would like you to write for five minutes without thinking, without stopping, without having to make sense or—’

Sarah let out a little moan.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, Sarah. You can’t fail at this exercise. Well actually, you can, you can fail if you stop writing. But you don’t have to bother about grammar or spelling or punctuation, just concentrate on keeping the pen going.’

‘But what are we supposed to write about?’ Sarah asked.

‘That’s what I’m telling you. It doesn’t have to be “about” anything. I am freeing you from the obligation of aboutness,’ Colette said, spreading her arms wide and smiling openly at them.

Izzy glanced at Fionnuala Dunleavy, who was eyeing Colette suspiciously, chawing on a piece of gum that seemed to be welded to her back teeth.

‘And what would we hope to achieve by doing an exercise like this?’ Thomas asked.

‘We’ll discuss that in detail afterwards, Thomas, but let’s just say for now that we’re trying to unlock something within us, to make ourselves think about something that we might not otherwise think of. Now take out a piece of paper and a pen.’

Everyone placed their notebooks in their laps, pens pointed at the page.

‘Go!’ Colette said.

Izzy wrote in a sort of secret script in case Colette would ask to see the work or for her to show it to her classmates. Her husband and son she was careful to represent with only ‘he’ and ‘they’. Still, the exercise encouraged such speed and lack of concentration that things were appearing on the page that she had not anticipated. At one point she wrote, ‘the ghost of a thought’, and that surprised her. Twice she put ‘and God forbid’, but she had no idea what she wanted God to forbid. She was only faintly aware of the noise of scribbling. She looked up from time to time and met the eye of one of her classmates momentarily lifting their head. But there was an atmosphere of seriousness and dedication, and even Colette was partaking in the exercise.

Izzy’s hand was just beginning to hurt when Colette shouted, ‘Stop!’

They each slowly raised their heads, eyes wide, entreating, like children disturbed from sleep. But Sarah kept writing.

It was in a bar, in fact, where Izzy had seen Tony Connolly – a bar in one of his own hotels, sitting there drinking with another woman in the middle of the day.

‘Now, how did everybody find that?’ Colette asked. ‘Izzy?’

‘Oh,’ she said, looking down at the page. ‘Nonsense really, I would say, most of it.’

‘But you kept going and that’s all that matters,’ Colette said, her eyes flitting back to Sarah, who was still scribbling away. ‘Does anyone think they’ve written something that could potentially be the beginning of a story or a poem? Sarah?’

But Sarah did not answer, she just kept focusing on the page, writing frantically.

‘Well, Colette,’ Eithne said. ‘It’s interesting you should ask that because I’m so surprised by what that exercise brought up in me.’ She held her piece of paper out in front of her like she was about to reveal whatever was written there and then placed her hand to her throat as if to stymie herself.

But Izzy saw that all of Colette’s attention was on Sarah. She reached across and Izzy recognised a tremor in her hand that settled only when her fingertips lighted gently on Sarah’s arm. Sarah stopped and looked up and Colette smiled at her. ‘It’s OK, Sarah, you can stop now,’ Colette said.

It was plain for everyone to see that she was crying, but more than this – that these tears were a great shock to her. Something had been cleaved open inside her and poured onto the page, and she was mortified.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Sarah said, and clapped her book shut and pulled her handbag onto her shoulder. She weaved away from them into the darkness of the hall.

‘Don’t worry,’ Colette said, quietly, ‘it happens more often than you might think. She’ll be back next week.’

The hall door echoed shut.

No, she won’t, Izzy thought.

*  *  *

When she woke the next morning, she could hear the hollow noise of the radio in the kitchen and Niall bounding up and down the stairs, more out of breath each time he descended, his father barking directions after him. She lay there with her eyes open listening to these sounds, separating one from the other, with James’s gruff demands underpinning it all. The difference was that this morning she did not feel full of hurt and resentment at the fact of his presence.

She got out of bed and pulled on the trousers and blouse she had worn the night before. She slipped into her house shoes and went downstairs.

Niall was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. He looked up at her from under his brow in exactly the way his father did – that look that always made her feel like some problem to be negotiated.

‘Hello, pet,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘You’d better hurry up now and get a lift with your father or else you’ll have to thumb to school.’

He smiled at that and ran upstairs.

She lowered the sound on the radio and sat at the table and poured herself a cup of tea from the pot. James walked into the room, tying his tie. He stopped dead when he saw her, the knot of his tie still halfway down his chest.

‘Well?’ she said, taking a sip from her tea.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Niall!’ he shouted. ‘Come on now, we’re going.’

‘How did you get on in Dublin?’ she asked.

‘Oh, business as usual,’ he said.

She had confounded him once again, she could see that; fighting for over twenty years and still he was never able to guess when she would cease hostilities. She was never sure either, but even by her own standards this thaw felt particularly sudden.

He slid the knot of his tie up to his throat. ‘Where were you last night?’ he asked, picking up his cup of tea.

‘Well, would you believe this – I was at a poetry workshop!’ She laid her hands delicately on the table and gave a little shake of her head.

‘A poetry workshop?’

‘A poetry workshop.’

He seemed to consider this carefully while he took a slug of his tea. ‘And who was at that?’

‘Oh, the usual crowd – the ones who go to everything. Fionnuala Dunleavy, Eithne Lynch, Thomas Patterson, and Tony Connolly’s wife was down from Donegal Town.’

‘Oh, she’s the most miserable-looking yoke.’

‘Anyway, she couldn’t hack it. She ran off in tears.’

‘She did not?’