Vroom vroom.
It was the silliest thing we had ever done – either of us – and it was surprisingly good fun. It happened, after much fuss and diplomatic incident, on a lovely day in April; church, hotel, bouquet, the lot.
About seven hundred of Conor’s cousins came up from Youghal. I’d never seen anything like it: the way they stood their rounds of drink, fixed their little hats in the mirrors, and checked the weight of the hotel cutlery when they picked it up to eat. They treated the day like a professional engagement, and danced until three. Conor said it might as well be your funeral; he said they hunt in packs. And my mother – who had, it turned out, ‘always been saving for this day’ – led a seasoned troupe of the Dublin middle classes, many of them old, all of them entirely happy, as they chatted and sat and sipped their peculiar drinks: Campari, whiskey and red, Harvey’s Bristol Cream. We were just the excuse. We knew it, as we went upstairs to change out of our duds and ride each other rotten against the back of the bedroom door. We were beside the point. Free.
My mother is there in the photograph album (five hundred euro, bound in cream leather, now mouldering under the kitchen counter in Clonskeagh). She wore a lilac-grey suit and a fascinator, no less, in grey and mauve, complete with face net, and those funny black feathers that arc out, stripped to bobbing dots of black.