Paul O’Toole says as he hands a wet bedsheet from the laundry basket up to me. I drape the heavy linen over the line then clothespin it down against the first warm breeze of the season. “I hate it, too,” I say. “‘A great day for drying,’ me mam back home in Naas would have said. Now, it’s a day for dying,” he says. Paul passes another dripping load up to me. “The spring offensive, they call it. The time when good weather lets them force the fellows out of the trenches with some bollocking battle plan that’ll turn out to be fecking useless. Take a few yards one day, lose them the next, and thousands of dead measuring every inch,” he says. “But you won’t be fighting, Paul,” I say. “And glad I am Nora, my heart,” he says. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty.” “I wouldn’t dare,” I say.
