That They May Face the Rising Sun

• Kate and Joe Ruttledge
• Jamesie and Mary
• Bill Evans (works for Jackie)
• Johnny and Anne Mulvey
• Cecil Pierce (neighbour)
• The Shah (Joe's uncle) and Annie May McKiernan
• Frank Dolan
• Jimmy Joe McKiernan
• John Quinn
• Margareth, Tom and Mary Sweeney; Jim (son of Jamesie and Mary) and Lucy, their parents
• Patrick Ryan, Edmund (brother)

‘It was all alphabetical’, Johnny said.

Jamesie rubbed his hands together gleefully and made a similarly playful gesture towards Mary that he had enough of talking and needed a drink. She answered with a ritualistic disapproving gesture as she went slowly to the press and took out a bottle of Powers.

‘You'll eat something?’
‘Begod I will, Kate, quick’, he said.

Now it was Ruttledge's turn to be dumbfounded. He had assumed that people who were so close for so long talked with one another. Now he had to acknowledge that in all the times he had seen them together never once had he witnessed even a brief conversation.

‘With people living longer there's a whole new class who are neither in the world or in the graveyard.’

After the war he returned to take a double-first in history and classics and then entered the law to discover that it wasn't acceptable to practise at the Bar with a thick regional accent; so he took himself to acting school where he acquired the accent that would serve him for the rest of his life, its only flaw being that it outdistanced what it sought to emulate.

‘He looks like something out of a Russian novel’, he said.
‘He's all ours, completely home-grown and mad alive.‘