DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:LAST WEEK I was looking out at the rain and thinking of my granny, who died when I was nine. I was in the room when it happened. She was saying that everything had gone dark. That she couldn't see anyone. That someone had put the lights out, though it was only the middle of the day. Everyone was fussing around the bed, and kneeling down and saying prayers.

I can still remember the melancholic light in her dark little kitchen, with it’s big black range, and her pots and black kettles, with their long spouts like swan’s necks and huge black handles. To sit in her rocking chair as a boy, before the flickering red coals of the range, was as close as I ever got to Heavenly peace.

I would have liked to spend the day with Olga. She understood ghosts. She used to say that she could still smell the soup from her grandmother’s kitchen on the far side of the Urals.

But Olga has gone away, so instead I had lunch with my mother in a Cavan hotel. The Farnham Arms is where, as a little boy, I first learned to dance. I was all hair oil and sweaty palms, and my fingers barely touched my partners’ shoulders as we waddled around the floor holding each other, in a floundering attempt at a waltz.

My mother also danced in that hotel. I have a photograph of her stepping out of a big American car, on her wedding day, in 1950; her own mother standing to attention at the hotel door, in a big hat. That was long before the time granny made me soup in her dark little kitchen.

That hotel used to be like the omphalos, or a village well, for gossip. It was a cosy source of “all knowing”. Whatever shocking thing happened behind closed doors, or whatever was too scandalous to print in the Anglo-Celt, was invariably discussed at length in that parliament of tittle-tattle.

For example, a friend of mine was fond of drink, and one night he drove home in the snow and crashed into a tree, doing a lot of damage to his skull and spine. His alcoholism was openly criticised at the bar, but he protested that the drink was his salvation.

He had lain unconscious all night in the snow. “But it was a blessing,” he announced to the lounge, “that I had whiskey in me system. It saved me life.”

And I knew a man who knew the boy who played school truant just to drink tea in that lounge with Anew McMaster. The boy wanted to be an actor.

McMaster urged him to avoid a theatre career if there was anything else he could do. So the boy found a job in the bank for a few years, before abandoning the caution of youth to follow his heart’s desire.

For me, the Farnham Arms Hotel is still full of ghosts.

Afterwards, I drove home by Finea, where they say a €50 note lies under the bridge. In earlier days the story was of 50 gold pieces; a little fortune shimmering in the water below.

I don’t know if Olga followed her heart’s desire, or just got desperate because of the recession, but on Christmas Day she got a phone call saying that a chef was required on an oil rig in the North Sea, and off she flew.

Now Olga too is a ghost remembered, who came to us for a while and made our world feel like a Russian novel; and she did a lot more than cook dinners, make coffee and wear silver boots. She helped us to let go of mother, and think of ourselves as men, not boys. Her grand-uncles were in gulags and her father fought at Leningrad, which she called the most beautiful city in the world. And she used to say that her grandmother made wonderful soup.

“That’s a coincidence,” I said. “So did mine.”

Olga was licking her fingers in my kitchen one minute; the next minute she was in the North Sea.

There is less buzz in Mullingar now; less traffic on the streets, less buns in the coffee shops. The Midlands no longer feel like a Russian novel. There are no illusions left, except for the dead leaves that shimmer in the waters beneath the bridge of Finea.