They stopped. The woman looked as if she wanted the floor to swallow her up. "My problem is a bit delicate," she murmured.

"Don't worry," Sita said, feeling her neck ease. "Doctors are used to delicate problems."

"What about seeing you in the playground? Won't we feel...?"

"Not in the slightest. What is said in these four walls-"

"No, it's not that, I just ... well, I came here because I promised my husband I'd talk to someone about ... my ... my, er..."

Sita waited. Her neck felt normal again. Slowly, she tried to right it. "Take your time." She had never said that in London.

"My, er, my lack of interest," the woman said. She stared at the floor. "I don't really know why I'm here, except I promised him I'd try. I don't know what you can do to help. I don't know what anyone can do. I've just gone off it, that's all. It's not him, it's me."

There was a brief mutual sigh.

"I understand," Sita said.

"Do you? Do you really?"

"Yes," said Sita again, "yes, I really do."

Jonathan didn't understand much of what was going on, even though he could hear every word from his bedroom.

"It's not purple, it's Real Indigo. Jaysus, it even says so on the side of the can."

"Oh, and I suppose you're painting your shelves Memory, and not just gray, are you?"

"That was yesterday. Would ye keep up!"

"Anyway, who said you could look at my paint charts?"

"Kat did."

"Well, she's not here, so she doesn't count."

"It is purple."

"It's Real Indigo. Anyway, where's the dog?"

Niall was at the foot of a ladder in Maya's bedroom, looking up at Emmy's dripping brush. He waved a paint-slopped copy of the Manifesto.

"What?" Emmy barked down at him.

"It says here, 'To have a purple bedroom and a dog.' And this is a Real Indigo bedroom with no dog. On the other hand, not a morsel of sushi have I let pass my lips in the last month, therefore I win and I claim my prize."

His hand ran quickly up the inside of her leg and she flicked the brush just as quickly toward his hair. Real Indigo mingled with the Natural Aubergine he had been painting his own walls with before Kat changed her mind. She kept e-mailing him with instructions and links to paint-company Web sites.

"You clash," Emmy told him. "Now bugger off. You've got work to do before you go to Ireland."

"You don't really mean that."

She climbed two steps down the ladder and put herself in a dangerous position. Hips level with lips. Niall gave a small groan.

"Yes I do, and you need to sort out the lid on your box," she said, bending her head to his ear. "It keeps flying open."

"That's because you keep prying it open."

They meant the box they had always kept their relationship in, shut away and labeled, where it couldn't cause any trouble.

"I don't."

"Ye do."

"I don't."

"Niall?" Jonathan shouted from the corridor, having skinned his knuckles for the second time trying to take off the gloss on the skirting board with a rusty paint scraper. "Have you got the blowtorch?"

The explosion of laughter was almost the last straw. "I'm sorry? Why is that so funny?" he asked, putting his head round the door. "And what are you doing in here anyway, Niall? Kat will kill you if she comes back and you haven't finished."

"I'm not in here. I took an earlier plane to Dublin, remember?"

That evening, Sita and Emmy sat against the wall of the house, drinking beer, catching the last of the sun and watching Maya and Asha try to get Lila to sit up without falling over. Each time, she rolled over, first sideways, then backward, then to the other side. The older girls shrieked with amusement, using the baby like a heavy-bottomed toy.

"She should really be sitting by now," Sita said. "The other two were."

"She's fine," Emmy told her. "All babies develop at their own rate. You should know that, of all people."

"But-"

"No buts. You want her to run before she can walk, you do."

"No, I just want her to sit up, that's all."

The girls stuffed Lila back into her car seat and started to practice cartwheels on the lawn. Jay was fishing in the pond with his strange little friend, Jonathan was inside on the computer, looking up limewashing on the Internet and Niall was on his quad in the field, pretending to tidy up the remnants of the bonfire but really seeing how fast he could corner without tipping.

"This is how it should be," Emmy said hazily, but in the silence that followed she felt obliged to add, "Isn't it?"

"Kind of," Sita said.

"Hard day?"

"Pretty much. They all are when you've got kids, aren't they?"

"Why don't you go and have a bath? Go and have a lie down with Jonathan."

"I can't."

"Yes you can."

"No," said Sita emphatically. "No, I mean it. I really can't."

6.

Cathal O'Connor was always slightly alarmed when he saw his younger brother again after a break. Greeting Niall at Dublin airport that afternoon was like advancing on one of those fairground mirrors in which characteristics you didn't know you had are distorted for comic effect. You aren't supposed to take the deformation seriously, but you can't help but think there is some truth in it, that the lines under your eyes really are that dark or your hair really is that wild.

Niall always looked unwashed and hung over, but at least he usually managed to dress without putting his sweater on inside out. Cathal, on the other hand, spent his nowadays in a suit which lulled him into a false belief that he had left the Men Behaving Badly look behind. But as soon as he saw the shambolic figure of his brother walking out of the arrivals gate, he knew without being told that his own shirt was hanging out at the back, his tie's innards were unraveling and his jacket pockets gaped from all the junk he carried around in them. As an architect, he was immaculate. It was his own personal spacial design that needed attention.

"You look like a bag o' shite," he told his brother as they made their way down Temple Bar. The gentrification of their old haunts annoyed them both intensely, but they still went there, if only to moan and scowl at the English stag-nighters.

"That's because I am one," he replied.

"Look at yer." Cathal flicked the label sticking out below Niall's unshaven neck.

"So I got dressed in a hurry."

"Her husband came back, did he?"

The line of mutual attack was normal. It always went on for the initial hour of their reunions, a nod to their teenage years when a public display of disrespect was the thing that shaped them. Playing the same game on the cusp of their forties helped them feel buoyant, although occasionally it also made them feel hopelessly depressed. Only when they looked at it through the bottom of their fifteenth pint glass, mind you.

Their one hundred relatives still held extensive post mortems about the O'Connor brothers' discourtesy. Such a shame when you came from such an innately courteous family, they'd say, but there it was. Never mind that the brothers were now only mildly irreverent, the mud had stuck. Their three sisters more than made up for it, though, securing sensible husbands and fifteen children between them before their younger brothers had even left university. Thank God for girls, the one hundred relatives agreed.

You could hardly put Cathal and Niall's uselessness down to the male genes. Joseph O'Connor, their father, had always been the very model of civility and safety. He didn't drink, he didn't swear, he kissed his children and adored his wife. When he'd died in their early twenties and they had sat next to his peaceful body in his satin-lined coffin, not knowing how to cry, both of them had realized with a weird pride that they were somehow less than him, even though they'd set out to be more. Outclassed by quiet averageness. The problem by then was that their personalities were set in stone-or pickled in alcohol, as their mother said-and they found that, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't be another Joe. So what did they do? Panicked, some would say. Cathal married a woman he'd known for only five minutes, and Niall went traveling.

Niall's trip to France hadn't been exactly planned. One minute he was maneuvering his bike through Richmond on his way to work as a restaurant manager at a mediocre hotel, and the next he turned right instead of left and ended up in Bordeaux, with the clothes he stood up in, his wallet and his Marlboro cigarettes. When he came back to England a year later, he knew so much about wine that he would have been a fool not to use the advantage. The other life change was that he now smoked Camels.

It was the age-old mistake of spending more time in the pub than he did at home that scotched Cathal's marriage, which was why his children now only got silent kisses down the phone. He missed his two boys even more than he missed his father, but they didn't seem to miss him. Not enough to take him up on his frequent invitations to stay, anyway.

"Oh, you come here, Dad," eleven-year-old Christopher said in response. "That'll be only the one flight, and anyway it's easier for you."

But it wasn't that easy to cross the Atlantic, and it made life difficult for them when he arrived. Their mother's American boyfriend was a little jumpy. A little jumpy and a bit big, but that was what steroids did for you, Cathal tried to joke, but it was hard to find the funny side when his youngest, Billy, was already picking up a Boston accent.

So not for the O'Connor brothers the semidetached family home in a suburb on Dublin's more affluent south side. Not for them the extension over the garage for the fifth bedroom to accommodate the results of Catholic contraception. And not for them the lifestyle the brothers had been weaned on, the kids coming home for lunch on their bikes, their father on foot from the factory, the whole family round the table for grace before chicken salad. Their adult worlds could not have turned out more differently if they had tried. In other words, in O'Connor family terms, they were long gone.

Without consultation, the two brothers turned on their heels at exactly the same time, and walked into the bar they always went to first, an establishment which brewed its own porter on the premises. It used to be one of those pubs you would go into only if you were looking for a fight.

An open iron staircase linked the three floors, beyond which you could now see the brewing chamber with its huge copper vats, pipes and wheels. Niall sniffed the mildly hop-flavored air appreciatively and tried to ignore the glittering brass bar counter. It was far too clean for his taste.

"Two pints of Guinness Extra-cold and two Powers chasers, please," he said to the black-haired, black-clad, black-eyed bar girl. When she turned her back, he asked Cathal, "Is she someone we went to school with?"

"Maybe the daughter of someone we went to school with, ye bloody eejit!"

It was Niall's eternal problem. He still thought he was twenty-one. Cathal, on the other hand, sometimes felt like an old old man. It was something to do with which side of forty they each lay. The whiskies went down in one synchronized move, even before the Guinness had settled in the drip tray.

"Didn't even touch the sides," said Cathal. "Another two, please, sweetheart. So come on, then, who made you put yer sweater on in such a hurry?"

Niall didn't answer. Instead, he raised his eyebrows and downed the second chaser in one as well. "W'd ye feck off."

Their lads' laugh trailed away as they watched the last milky swirl of the agitated Guinness settle to its velvety black. In a minute, they would relax enough to talk properly. The banter was wearing as thin as their hair, but they would always want to go through the motions. It was what they did.

"C'mon, tell me." Cathal tried again. "How's it going in Cornwall? Is it everything you hoped it would be?"

"Yeah, it's great," Niall said, lighting up and concentrating on the first draw. "Ah, that's good."

"Well, go on, gobshite."

"That's it. It's great."

"Is that all you've got to tell me? It's great?"

"Well, it's early days but y'know." If Cathal had asked him yesterday, it would have been easier.

"No, I don't know. You look bloody terrible."

"Thanks for that." Niall flicked ash into an ashtray and reached for his glass.

"The move isn't irreversible, is it? I mean, y'know, if it's clearly a mistake and all that."

"Who said anything about a mistake? No, it's good, really, it's great."

"Is it like the back of beyond there or what?"

"You should come over, see for yerself."

"Yeah, I could do with a break, but I was thinking Goa, really."

"Ah. Goa it is not."

"It's been pissin' it down here for weeks, too."

"Can't help you there. We've hardly seen the rain. Cornwall's practically tropical."

"Fantastic. So go on, how's PopCork Online? Still raking it in without the team?"

"Ticking over. I'll go back to it properly after another fortnight, but I want to concentrate on the move for a bit. The household needs to bed itself down." Niall tried to let his bad choice of words wash over him, but the silence got the better of him. "I don't really look terrible, do I?"

"Yes, you do."

"I was only coming to see you. I didn't think I needed a tie or anything."