"One sudden jolt," he said.

"You'll just have to drive carefully."

When the rain stopped they brought out the biggest pots and put them down on the floor behind the front seats. The conservatory now seemed bare, shorn of its colour, as he locked the door to the garden and put the key in his pocket, and then locked the door which led to the conservatory from the dining room, putting both keys in a drawer in the sideboard, as Carmel had told him to do.

He drove away from the house; they did not speak until they were beyond Shankill.

"There's something I should tell you," she said. "I was going to tell you before we left, but I couldn't bring myself to say it. Niamh came over yesterday to say that she's pregnant. She thought that we had noticed on Sunday when she came for dinner, but I didn't notice anyway. Did you notice?"

He did not reply. He looked straight ahead as he drove. Niamh was their only daughter.

"It was the last thing I thought of," Carmel went on. "She sounded very cool, but I think she was dreading having to tell me. How could she be so foolish! I couldn't sleep last night thinking about it."

Carmel did not speak again until later when they were stopped at the traffic lights in Arklow. The atmosphere in the car was tense with their silence.

"I asked her who the father was. I didn't even know she had a boyfriend. She said she didn't want to talk about the father. She still only works part-time, you know."

When he had driven through the town she spoke again.

"She went to England to have an abortion, and she couldn't face it. She was in the hospital and everything, she had paid her money. I told her that we'd do what we could for her, I told her that I was pro-life all the way. I felt so sorry for her. Imagine Niamh having an abortion. So she's going to have the baby and she's going to keep it. Eamon, I wrote her a cheque. But it's a terrible thing to happen, isn't it?"

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