"Yes indeed."

"I'd recognize this piece of junk anywhere, Julie. It belongs to your mother."

Guess who walks through the kitchen door just then.

Mum is great. She really is. She has Ronan by the balls. She's performing this charm assault on him that would make Michelle Pfeiffer look like Splodge.

The stages of her crafty, highly skilled technique are as follows: 1 Warm smile: "Hello, Ronan! " "

2 Diversionary tactics: "That's a lovely new fish tank you got." She goes over to admire.

3 Blaming me: "You should have let Julie buy it; after all, she was the one who broke it " "

4 Humble apology: "Oh, by the way, Ronan, I'm sorry about the piano. I know it's taking up a terrible amount of space... " "

5 Feigned recognition of authority: "...but if it's all right with you... " "

6 Lies and conspiracy: "...I'll keep it here for just a few days until we sell it off again."

Old women, as we know, get away with murder.

Ronan is barely reassured. He just stands there, hands on his hips, exhaling deeply. He makes some face-saving, humorous comment about how the lounge in its present colour scheme reminds him of Carolan's Irish Cream.

Then he goes out and takes a shower, and prepares himself for dinner at La Boheme's, which he booked for the two of us to shut me up.

"He's right about one thing, though," Mother says when we have the room once more to ourselves.

"What?"

"That smell."

"Yes," I reply, lowering my eyes to my magazine. "I had no idea salmon would smell like that."

"You were cooking salmon?"

"Yes, a kind of mousseline." She grins, but in a way that makes me highly apprehensive.

My mother brought me up to be a good Christian and a good animal lover. Good Christians and good animal lovers don't do what I did to those tropical marine fish. Dead or alive.

"Oh, and by the way, Julie."

"Mm?"

"Where are all the missing fish?"

When I look up I can see her smiling, bespectacled eyes boring into me over the top of her magazine. They are dazzling me with suspicion.

I stand up at once and leave the room.

29 29.

And here we are at La Boheme's.

Ronan is formal and quiet and distant. For his starter, he's eating breaded mushrooms with yoghurt sauce, a fairly vile combination in my book. I'm just sitting here slivering lemony smoked salmon into my principal orifice, feeling a bit wicked over the fish.

We eat in silence.

Whenever we dine out he rarely speaks during the first third of his meal. His excuse is that eating is a form of work and he can't do two things at once. The truth, however, is that conversing with wives is a form of work. Mistresses, now, that's a different matter entirely.

In time our escalopes de veau escalopes de veau (Ronan) and roast duck with orange sauce ( (Ronan) and roast duck with orange sauce (moi ) arrive. It's not before his eighth bite into his escalopes that Ronan is ready for his speciality: communication. ) arrive. It's not before his eighth bite into his escalopes that Ronan is ready for his speciality: communication.

"So..." he begins.

"Comma."

"How is your duck?"

"Hysterical."

He chuckles to himself.

"Ronan."

"Mm?"

"When are you taking your summer leave?"

He clears his throat after a delayed spell of munching, wine-sipping and glass replacement.

"Some time between mid-August and mid-September."

"Possibly early September?"

"Yes, why?"

"No reason. I just thought it'd be nice to go back to Corfu."

"Corfu?" he says. "Why not? It's lovely in August."

"Do you remember our holiday there?"

We reminisce a little about the heat, the long, winding paths down to the beach on which locals on mules sold us cheap wine, the sunsets over the sea, Sotiris's restaurant in the evenings, the music and dancing, one dance where a waiter rotated on his haunches, swinging a table from his teeth.

"Behaviour like that can dislodge one's fillings," he observes.

We talk about the women dressed in black from head to toe, the tiny whitewashed terraced houses and alleyways, the strange language, the way we used to pick figs from the fig trees behind the beach...

"It was so...authentic," I sigh.

"If you exclude the Sunday Times Sunday Times."

I laugh despite myself.

He breaks off and butters a small piece of breadroll and pops it into his mouth. "I'd go back for the feta cheese alone."

"The baclavas."

"The swordfish, the vino mavro... vino mavro... " "

"That was a bit sharp, Ronan."

"What? The wine?" He grins. "Remember the orange brandy?"

"The ouzoafter that I remembered nothing."

"The baked Gruyere: not bad considering it wasn't French."

"The lobster. Ugh!"

"The brain: a rare delicacy," he says.

"Only in your head is brain a delicacy, Ronan."

"Very good, Julie."

"The mosquitoes..."

He frowns. "What sauce did they come with?"

"Seriously, though, they drove me insane."

"The thing about mosquitoes," he begins, slicing his veal, "is that those insects are highly gifted. Telepathic. You know, people think that they attack only when you switch the light off. They don't: they wait until you've stopped thinking about them. Then they pounce. They're even more cunning than spiders."

"They were huge. Like bluebottles suspended in mid-air."

"Not unlike yourself, Julie, they are partial to big epidermal booze-ups."

"Anyway," I remind him, ignoring this, "we got our revenge."

"Yes, although our host wasn't too happy with the red dots all over the wallpaper."

"I wasn't too happy with them all over my body."

"And he wasn't too pleased with our squeaking bed either."

"How were we to know he was sleeping in the room beneath?"

"You could hear him snoring."

"That's true. But we never got up to anything until until he started snoring." he started snoring."

"You forget, Julie, that he had a wife."

"Don't remind me. The one with the whiskers."

"Do you remember the bed?"

"Hard and bristly," I reply.

"It nearly gave me a slipped disc."

I pause at this point.

"We know why."

Ronan laughs. "I seem to remember once getting a leg stuck in the cast-iron bed-end."

Kinky sex again. You just can't get him off it.

"We're talking Greek Orthodox, Ronan. Those beds were designed like that for a reason."

For the first time in months I have just made Ronan choke on his food.

An excellent sign for the future.

"Ronan, I want us to go back there."

"Sounds good to me."

"I was thinking...the first week in September."

"What's wrong with August?" He doesn't catch my gaze. He lifts up his wineglass instead.

"A friend of Sylvana's has an apartment in Pelekas but it's booked up in August. And I have to be back at work for the second week of September."

"Leave it with me."

"No. We have to grab it while it's there. I want to go in early September, Ronan."

He frowns at my insistence. "I may have something on that week."

"Such as?"

"But I'll get back to you on it, as soon as I can."

Restrained, I sip my Chateauneuf. "By the way, I've booked the theatre."

"What's on?"