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polish the sign lovingly, getting up on a ladder early in the morning with a soapy cloth, a wet cloth and a dry cloth.
    She was the same behind the bar, she shone up the bar decorations as if they were precious ornaments. A lot of pubs had the mock Staffordshire figures of a hurler and a footballer standing on a plinth, dressed in the colours of the particular county. Underneath it said, ‘On all grounds, Players Please’. Kate had explained the puns to the twins as John had marvelled. He had looked at the thing a thousand times and never even noticed the words and what they meant. Fine that, for a man who thought himself a poet.
    And Kate had been great about that too. She never came up with any talk about what did a fat, country pub owner think he was doing rawmeishing away in verse. Far from it, she would sit at his knee and ask him to read what he had written. Sometimes her head rested on his lap, and she would sigh in appreciation or else she might question it and ask what image was in his mind. She had long dark curly hair and very dark brown eyes, almost black. She never grudged the time he spent up in their bedroom trying to write – and trying it often was. She minded the bar happily, only suggesting that John should be there at set times like for the lunchtime trade and for the time when they had the half-past-six news on Radio Eireann, and the customers would expect the man of the house to be present to serve their pints and comment on the day’s events.
    John Ryan was not a great man for formal prayers. Mass time was spent as near the back of the church as possible; in summertime right out in the open air and in thoughts not connected with the actual liturgy taking place. But he did offer prayers of thanks to somewhere, that he had met Kate. He could so easily have not met her. Suppose Jack Coyne’s had not been closed that time when she came in with the puncture, suppose the puncture had happened eleven miles on down the road – they’d have gone to the big town instead. Suppose she had been travelling with a girl who could mend a puncture instead of that giggling friend of hers, who could hardly ride a bike.
    All these things were too much to think about. Like the really black bit after John had seized his chance and arranged to meet Kate again and again, and his motherhad said that he was to bring no flighty Dublin girl into this pub, the business belonged to the whole family. John had nearly upped and off at that stage, but Kate had begged him to be understanding. What did the poor old mother mean except that she was afraid of losing him like she had lost her husband and all the rest of her family, two sons priests and far away, two daughters nuns and even farther away in Australia, and the other two sons in America without a notion of coming back.
    Kate said he should be patient, sit it out. Old Mrs Ryan would come round in time: in the meantime Kate would learn the bar trade in Dublin. And learn it she did, dropping her good salary as a secretary in a firm of solicitors and becoming a maid of all work in a small hotel so that she could become accustomed to working the bar.
    By the time Mrs Ryan had mellowed, Kate knew all she would need to know about serving a ball of malt, a half one, a black and tan, and a half. She knew when a customer had too much and when to cash a cheque or start a slate. They had been married quietly. It was 1948, there wasn’t much money about and not many relations either. John’s mother was there, face sour, clothes black, but at least she was there.
    Kate had no family at all. Her mother had died after a life of martyrdom and self-pity. Her father had married again and believed that his new wife had been slighted by everyone, so went nowhere. No amount of persuasion would make them come to her wedding, so Kate O’Connell stood with four friends including Lucy, the girl who couldn’t mend punctures either, and married John Francis Ryan, sandy-haired, plump poet who had to