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quick, assessing look, then sat down at the table.
    “Oh, Michael Francis,” she’d whispered, her hand held to her forehead.
    “What?” his father said, looking from one to the other. “What’s the matter?”
    “How could you do this to me?”
    “What?” his father said again.
    “He’s knocked someone up,” Aoife muttered.
    “Eh?”
    “Knocked someone up, Dad,” she repeated loudly, lolling on the sofa, her flawless, fourteen-year-old limbs sprawling over the arms. “Impregnated her, put a bun in the oven, got a girl in trouble, done a—”
    “That will do,” his father said to her.
    Aoife shrugged a shoulder, then eyed Michael, as if with new interest.
    “Is this true?” his father said, turning to him.
    “I …” He opened his hands. This was not meant to happen,he wanted to say. She wasn’t meant to be the one I married. I was going to do my PhD, sleep with everyone I could lay my hands on, then go to America. This marriage and baby were not part of the plan.
    “The wedding’s in two weeks.”
    “Two weeks!” His mother started to cry.
    “In Hampshire. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
    “Oh, Michael Francis,” his mother said again.
    “Where in Hampshire?” his father asked.
    “Is she Catholic?” Aoife said, swinging her bare foot, biting a crescent from her biscuit.
    Their mother gasped. “Is she? Is she a Catholic?” She glanced across at the Sacred Heart that hung on the wall. “Please tell me she is.”
    He cleared his throat, shooting a furious look at Aoife. “She is not.”
    “What is she, then?”
    “I … I don’t know. C of E, I’d guess, but I don’t think it’s a very important part of—”
    Their mother lurched from the table with a wail. Their father slapped his newspaper against his palm. Aoife said, apparently to no one, “He’s gone and knocked up a Prod.”
    “Shut your bloody mouth, Aoife,” he hissed.
    “Mind your language,” his father thundered.
    “This will be the death of me,” their mother cried from the bathroom, rattling the bottles of her tranquilizers. “You might as well just kill me now.”
    “Fine,” Aoife murmured. “Who wants to go first?”
    Hughie was born and the lives of Claire and Michael Francis were rerouted. Claire would have finished her history degree and taken up the kind of job girls like her did then after graduation: she might have worked on a magazine or perhaps as a solicitor’s secretary. She would have shared a flat in London with a friend,a place full of clothes and makeup. They would have taken messages for each other, entertained their boyfriends with meals put together in the narrow kitchen. They would have washed their smalls in the sink and dried them over the gas fire. Then, after a few years, she would have married a solicitor or a businessman and they would have moved out to a house like her parents’, in Hampshire or Surrey, and Claire would have had several well-groomed children and she would have told them stories about her bachelor-girl days in London.
    Michael would have done his doctorate. He would have worked his way through the best-looking women in the city—and there seemed to be lots of them, all over the place, in London in the late 1960s—the women in black kohl and polo-necks, the ones in floaty dresses, the ones in impossibly short skirts and long boots, the ones with hats and sunglasses, the ones with chignons and tweed coats. He would have tried them all, one by one. And then he would have got a professorship in America. Berkeley, he’d been thinking, or NYU or Chicago or Williams. He’d had it all planned. He would have sailed away from this country and he would never have come back.
    But, as it turned out, he had to abandon his PhD. It wasn’t possible to support a wife and child on his grant. He got a job teaching history at a grammar school in the suburbs. He rented a flat off Holloway Road, near where he’d spent his childhood, and he and Claire took