'Your house is very nice,' Helen said coldly.

'Declan loved my garden and was full of ideas yesterday as to how to improve it,' Lily said.

'It's a pity I'm not Declan,' Helen said.

'How is he?' her grandmother asked.

'He's starting to get bad diarrhoea,' Helen said.

'God, the poor man,' her grandmother said. 'You know we should kneel down now and say a decade of the Rosary for him.'

'You can leave me out of that, Granny, if you don't mind,' Helen said.

'I'll say the Rosary with you later, Mammy,' Lily said.

'Oh, I'll pray on my own. I don't know what's got into the two of you.'

'Mammy,' Helen said, 'I'd love if one of my sons was a really good musician \a151 his father would love it too, but they're not, neither of them, and we just have to live with them as they are. I suppose I wish one of them had been a girl, I'd like to have had a daughter, but I don't think about it. I wish you'd been satisfied with me at some stage, even though I'm not what you wanted. I wish you'd stop wishing I was someone else.'

'Helen, I've always accepted you,' her mother said.

'That's a lovely word for it, thanks,' Helen said.

'Helen and Lily, stop the two of you and make up,' Mrs Devereux said.

Later in the afternoon when Paul came into the kitchen, he looked worried.

'It's very difficult to get rid of diarrhoea once it starts,' he said. 'He's taken a few things to stop it, but they don't seem to be having an effect.'

'What should we do?' Helen asked.

'Hope it goes, but if it continues into tomorrow he'll have to go back to St James's.'

'Is it something he ate?' Mrs Devereux asked.

'No; he's had problems with his stomach for the last year,' Paul said. He went out and the three women sat at the kitchen table.

'He knows it all, that young man,' Lily said.

'I think he's been through a lot more with Declan than we have,' Helen said.

'I don't think there's ever any substitute for your own family,' Lily said.

Helen wondered if everything her mother said was designed to irritate and provoke her.

'Declan has been very lucky with his friends,' Helen said.

'And not so lucky with others,' Lily said.

'What do you mean?' Helen asked.

'Well, there must be people who led him astray. I wonder where they are now.'

'I don't think he needed much leading,' Helen said.

'When Declan left my house, he was a young man anyone would be proud of,' Lily said.

'He was also gay,' Helen said.

'The two of you will have to be separated,' Mrs Devereux said.

'But isn't it funny that his two friends are healthy and he's sick? It's easy for them being around him now,' Lily said.

'I don't know what you mean,' Helen said.

'Your grandmother told me that one of them gave a very vulgar account of himself. He's lucky I was in the other room. I would have run him out of here. And you all laughed and egged him on!' Lily said.

'Including Granny,' Helen said.

'Oh Helen, when I thought about it afterwards, I imagined your grandfather and things like that being said in this room,' her grandmother said.

Helen addressed her mother directly: 'It was funny, and you weren't here for it and you missed it and there's no point in making moralistic comments about it.'

'Listen to the teacher with her class,' Lily said.

'You'll just have to learn to tolerate people,' Helen said. 'And it seems really odd to me that you can talk about what sort of daughter you'd like to have had in front of me.'

'Would you rather that I did it behind your back?' her mother asked.

'Yes I would, actually,' Helen said.

'I just wish you'd take an interest in me and my life,' Lily said.

Helen noticed her mother's face changing, as it had done in the car the previous evening. Suddenly, she seemed vulnerable, desolate, as though she were waiting for the one remark to which she would have no reply. Her eyes were filling with tears.

'Mammy, I will do that,' Helen said. 'When all this is over, I will do that, but you'll have to stop wishing I was somebody else.'

'And I'd love to meet your children and Hugh,' her mother said.

'The younger one is a little terror,' her grandmother said.

'I'm sure they'd love you, Mammy,' Helen said.

'Oh would they, Helen? I don't think they would.' Lily began to cry. Mrs Devereux came and put her arm around her shoulder.

'I'm sure they would, Mammy,' Helen said again.

Lily wiped her eyes and took out a mirror and began to reapply her eye make-up. Helen could see that she was getting ready to say something else. 'The fact that you didn't ask us to your wedding', Lily began again, 'is not nothing, not just something we missed for a few hours one day. We never saw you smiling and happy, having something you wanted, being with someone who loved you and who you loved. We never even saw photographs of it, if there were any photographs. And we never saw you with your babies. We missed all of that.'

The crying and the sympathy, Helen saw, had given her mother strength and courage. She spoke as though she believed that no one would contradict her, or reply to her. Helen sat back and smiled before she spoke.

'I didn't want you at my wedding. It was important for me that you would not sponsor me, or take credit for me, when it had nothing to do with you. You had all my life to see me smiling and happy, and since you took no notice of me in private, I wasn't going to have you make a big play of me in public. But I do agree with you that it's not nothing.'

'You've said enough to each other now,' Mrs Devereux said. 'Helen, I've never known a child who was as loved as you were by both your father and your mother, who was brought everywhere and given everything. They would come down here on a Sunday and their biggest boast would be that you had walked two steps, or said a word, or grown your teeth. I've never known a child who got as much attention as you.'

'Sorry, Granny. I know Declan's sick and it sounds petulant and spoiled to be complaining.'

'What are you complaining about?' her mother asked.

'I'm complaining that you don't love me the way I am, you want me to change. I'm complaining, actually, that you don't like me.'

'Helen, do you think if you had a problem that I would not drop everything to help you, to come to your assistance?'

'But that's not what I want from you. You've just invented a person in extreme need. I'm not that person, stop inventing me and projecting things on to me.'

'You're a very cold person, Helen,' her mother said.

'You can say anything about me and it will sound true,' Helen said.

'You know, after your father died, I could never get you close to me. I came home, and I noticed it first at the funeral that you wouldn't meet my eyes. When we settled back in together, the three of us, you were distant, you gave me no affection, you never told me anything and you brought no friends home, there were no girls whispering or watching television together. It was you studying, or going to bed on time, or moving around the house like a ghost passing judgement on us all.' Her mother's eyes were sharp; her voice was full of contempt.

'I never understood,' Helen said, 'how you could leave us down here for so long without visiting us when my father was sick.'

'Is there a need to rake over everything?' her grandmother asked.

'You don't know what happened to your father,' Lily said, 'how afraid he was, and how lonely and upset he was in the hospital even though I was there every day. I had no choice. Is that what's been eating away at you all these years?'

'Declan and I felt abandoned then, even though Granny and Grandad were nice to us, we felt abandoned, yes, if that's what you want to know. Yes, and I suppose it's true that it has been eating away at me all these years, as you put it. I'm the one who took it to heart.' Helen was almost crying now.