'They are,' she said and smiled.

'I'd better go before they wake up,'he said.

This was their secret language; they mimicked adults, they spoke to one another like a married couple. Cathal hated instructions or orders or being spoken to like a child. If she had told him to go to the bathroom, he would have dawdled and delayed. When Manus is his age, she thought, I will have to carry him to the bathroom.

They were the first to live in this house, and the first in their estate to build an extension — a large, square, bright room which served as kitchen and dining-room and playroom. Hugh had wanted the house for the beech tree which, through some miracle, had been left in their back garden, and the park behind the house. She had liked only the newness, the idea that no one had ever lived here before.

She washed up from the night before and noticed from the kitchen window a breeze flit through the leaves of the beech tree and the fir trees at the edge of the park, and then a sudden darkening in the air, a sense of rain. She turned on the radio — Hugh, as usual, had it tuned to Raidio na Gaeltachta — and found Radio One just as the pips sounded for the nine o'clock news. She would be able to listen to the weather forecast.

As she and Cathal were having breakfast, Cathal engrossed in a comic, the shouting and laughing began upstairs. Manus was squealing at the top of his voice.

'Listen to them,' she said. 'It's hard to know which of them is the bigger baby.'

Cathal smiled at her and took a slice of toast and went back to his comic. They ate in silence as the noise upstairs

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