Marriage is a tricky business at the best of times. No doubt about that. But the dodgiest bit is the beginning, the first year or so. A virtual minefield. We had just made it through Christmas, just about got over the low-intensity war which began, months before, with the fateful words "My mother wants to know where we are spending . . ." when big, heart-shaped cards began to appear in the shops. Valentine's Day.
Scheduled to teach all day on that particular fourteenth of February, I began by bringing a group of second years to the school library. Most of them were working away when a large van pulled up outside, darkening the room ominously.
The rear doors burst open and a few seconds later a delivery man backed out holding what seemed like a sizeable section of the Botanic Gardens. As he staggered past the window one of the class, a relentlessly inquisitive girl, Jessica, spotted him.
"Hey look, Valentine's Day flowers," she whispered, but she might as well have roared because there was an immediate rush to the window. And there they remained, most of the girls in the group, fixed to the window like barnacles to a rock.
"I bet they're from Simon to Aisling," said Jessica in a forlorn whine, conjuring up an image of a much-observed, love-besotted senior cycle couple who mooned around the corridors staring into each others' faces.
Amid protracted attempts to get the gawking group seated, I didn't notice the school secretary come into the library. But as she approached I somehow got a momentary glimpse of what was to follow and began nodding sternly as she whispered the awful truth in my ear.
An open card? "Boundless love, C."
As she walked away I wanted to shout after her, tell her it was all a big mistake; that my wife was sensible, intelligent, had a Masters in Anglo American literature - for God's sake, not the sort of person to fall for the manipulative commercialism of Valentine's Day. But I was being observed. Closely.
After school, in a series of Mr Bean type manoeuvres, I slid in and out between the cars in the car park, craning and ducking as I trailed the noisy, cellophane-wrapped roses behind me, determined to get to the car without being spotted. Suddenly at the other end of the car park a head popped up, then another and another, just like the Indians on the ridge in a Western. Then the unmistakable voice of Jessica. A war cry. "It's him and he has the flowers."
In the split second while I tried to decide whether to run back into the school building or make a dash for the car I was surrounded: dozens of them, plying me with questions. There was nothing for it except to smile insipidly and watch whatever self-possession or authority I had drain away with the short answers I was giving.
On the way home I tried to think of ways of saying how surprising it had been, how overwhelming, without endorsing it too much in case it became a precedent for the future. But I was too strungout to think calmly and began to slide into that illogical frame of mind where I could easily have stomped in, flowers in hand saying ". . . and what's more we spent all of Christmas with your wacky family". I may even have drifted into the comfort zone of getting even, wondering how I could make a comeback in the next round. Easter eggs. No. Easter Bunniegram to her office.
But then, when I walked in and saw the expectancy, the unquestionably good faith in which those flowers were sent, I became a smiling blob of putty. Rightly Valentined.
James Ryan's second novel Dismantling Mr Doyle, published last September, is due out in paperback in May.