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feel sad for my mother. I feel gutted that she lost all of this because she had me. She could have gone to England and had an abortion, but she didn’t. She was a good mother, a terrific one. And your parents rejected her because of something that no one in Ireland blinks twice at these days.’
    He winces and begins to say something, but stops.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
    ‘It’s all right. You’re entitled to say what you feel.’
    But I don’t say any more because he looks too uncomfortable. I’ve said enough.
    Over lunch, he tells me about their childhood, his and my mother’s, in this lovely house with its gravel drive and gently rolling lawns. He tells me about the games they played as children and the pets they had.
    ‘Then I went off to boarding school. Only down the road. Ridiculous, really – I could have gone there as a day boy. But that’s what you did in those days, if you had a bit of money – you sent your children away. We were, I suppose, what used to be called Castle Catholics. Marjorie refused to go away, though. They wanted to send her to some place down the country, but she threw a few tantrums and they gave in. She went to the local convent as a day girl.’
    ‘And then what?’
    He looks at me as if he’s not sure what I am asking.
    ‘I mean, what did she do after school. And –’ I falter, bracing myself to ask the question I’ve wanted to ask since I arrived here – ‘how did she come to have me?’
    ‘She did what most other girls who didn’t want to become teachers or nurses or work in a bank did. She went to secretarial college and did shorthand and typing. And then she got a job as a secretary. She worked for years at the Tennyson brewery in Crumlin. And then she . . . well, she had you.’
    ‘I never knew that. Where she worked, I mean. She told me nothing, really. And she never told me anything about my father. I was hoping you might be able to.’
    ‘I’m sorry, but I have no idea. She didn’t tell our parents or me anything about him, either. It does surprise me, though, that she didn’t talk to you about him. Didn’t she tell you anything at all?’
    ‘She told me he was called David Prescott and that he was English, and that he’d gone back to England before I was born. She told me nothing more than that. Does the name mean anything to you at all?’
    ‘I’m afraid not.’
    But even as disappointment wells up in me, I feel a tiny bubble of hope, because Richard has given me a piece of information I hadn’t previously been aware of – where my mother had worked before she had me. That had been something else she had glossed over, telling me only that she had worked in an office and that it hadn’t been very interesting.
    ‘Is it possible that my father worked at the Tennyson brewery, too?’ I ask. ‘Maybe he was her boss. Was her boss English?’
    ‘I really can’t remember, Louise. He may have been English – almost certainly was, because it was an English company and only a few of the senior people were Irish. But even if the man she worked for was English, it doesn’t necessarily mean he was your father. Marjorie was . . . vivacious, outgoing. She had friends. She knew a lot of people, a lot of men.’
    ‘But if my father was English and she worked for an English company, surely the most likely place for her to have met him was there? At Tennyson’s?’
    ‘She could have met him somewhere else. She hung around with a fashionable crowd. And there were a lot of English people at Trinity. He could have been one of them.’
    ‘I could still go and talk to the brewery people. They would have a record of when she worked there, who she worked for, wouldn’t they?’
    ‘Ah. Well, now, I’m afraid Tennyson’s doesn’t exist any more. It closed down years ago. Look, Louise, it may be that your father is the man she worked for. Or it may be someone else who worked for the company. But if your mother refused to tell