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was married, but she said she couldn’t see him anymore because it would break up his marriage and that wouldn’t be fair. Maura noticed with rage that he had a series of other companions after her, and that his wife still appeared on his arm at premieres and cocktail parties. It made nonsense of this love-and-marriage thing. But maybe they had been very childish, she and her friends Mary and Deirdre, back in the awful, old-fashioned fifties.
    After what seemed an endless courtship Mary eventually married Paudie Ryan, and Deirdre came home from Wales in a very short skirt that caused a lot of comment, and Paudie Ryan’s awful sister, Kitty, was the bridesmaid. Kitty wore a particularly horrible pink, which pleased Maura; at least it meant that Mary had stayed true to some of her principles anyway—like decking out an enemy bridesmaid in the worst gear possible. And there were melon slices instead of soup.
    Maura’s desperate brother Brendan and his horrific friends kept asking Maura and Deirdre were they on the shelf now and would they like to play a game of Old Maid. That was bad enough but a lot of the older people were just as rude and intrusive.
    “Time you two were settling down yourselves now,” they would say, wagging their heads in a way that made Maura want to scream.
    “Too choosy, that’s what they are,” said Maura’s father gloomily.
    “Wouldn’t want to wait too long all the same,” said Maura’s mother.
    “Is there any hardware shop in the neighborhood you’d like me to marry into, by any chance?” Maura snapped, and regretted it immediately.
    “You could do worse,” her mother said, mouth in a hard line.
    Later on in the day, Deirdre whispered to Maura that she toomight be getting married, but that David’s people where Chapel and hated the whole idea of priests and it was all very problematic. They went to Mary’s room as she was getting changed into her going-away outfit.
    “Well, I’ll be the first to know,” she said excitedly.
    “Know what?”
    “About the first night,” Mary said, as if it were obvious. It was the middle of the liberated sixties. Even the swinging sixties.
    Deirdre, seven years in permissive Wales, looked aghast.
    Maura, seven years in bohemian Dublin, with a total of three consummated romances to her record, looked at Mary in disbelief. But it was their friend’s wedding day, so they recovered quickly. And they all giggled, as they had done ten years ago.
    “Imagine,” they said. “Imagine.”
    Maura found her family particularly trying that weekend of Mary’s wedding. Her sister the nun was home from the convent, dying to know every detail of the ceremony, and had Mary promised to Obey. She had—good, good. There was a lot of nonsense talked about that these days, said her sister. The women’s liberation people were only doing more harm than good.
    Maura snapped at her that just because nuns took a vow of obedience, it didn’t mean that half the human race, the female half, should do the same thing. Her sister’s eyes looked hurt and pained, but Maura saw their mother making terrible facial gestures and signs behind her. It was as if to say, “Go easy on poor Maura—she’s obviously very jealous of Mary getting married.”
    This annoyed her even more.
    “What do all those antics mean, Mam?” she demanded.
    “Oh, very touchy, very touchy indeed,” said her mother.
    Her elder brother said, “That friend of yours Deirdre is a bit of a goer—I’d say she’s no better than she should be over in Wales,” and Maura wanted to smash him into the ground. He had reached this view after feeling under Deirdre’s short skirt and getting a knee in the groin as a response.
    Her young brother, Brendan, who normally had a variety of songs to sing tunelessly to his unmusical strumming of a guitar, had only one song, and the chorus was “I’ll die an old maid in the garret.”
    Her father, as usual, said nothing, had no views on any subject, and her