Hypocrites, he’d murmur. And yet he knew there can be no more pitiful sight than those who are defeated in love. He was an object of pity and therefore to be avoided. He had become the very thing he despised – a man obsessed with his own misfortune. And yet each afternoon he found himself on the bridge looking with a beating heart towards the mainland.

He dreamed he was about some business in the yard with a torch, moving bags of bottles through a tentative dusk-light, when she beckoned him from the kitchen door. He found that he was standing in his pyjamas. Jack dropped the spanner, checked the sky and went in.

She sat and looked at him. “Have you come back to me?” he asked. She nodded. “It’s very sensible here,” she said. She looked with admiration round his small house. He knelt beside her and she began to look quite practical, the way women do when they know there’s pleasure ahead. Her eyes had a bright, knowing light. Jack needed to rest his head in her lap. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said, and he leaned forward to rest his head. Then the blur, increasing its soft outlines, troubled him again. “Catherine, Catherine,” he said, but she kept silent, afraid maybe of argument, of saying the wrong things, of committing herself.

Then some part of his consciousness began, against his will, to stand aside.

He woke to find himself crying in a shocking free manner. Her visit had been so unbelievably real that for a long time he fought against returning to the waking world. The sheds were lit by a violet dawn light. Eagle Island sent out its three flashes. He tuned the radio to popular songs, and lay in the bed, his head upright, listening intently.

Someone shouted his name in the late afternoon, and hammered at the door. He heard the dog barking. Jack pulled on a pair of jeans. He opened the door. The dog raced into the room. The wind was screeching. He opened the door wider. There was no one there. He stepped round to the gable. There stood Hugh, the chef and barman from the Erris Hotel, and his wife Isobel.

“Yes?” said Jack.

“You asked me to call,” said Hugh.

“Oh that’s right,” he mumbled.

“You have the place looking well.”

“Inside is a mess.”

He shook Isobel’s hand. “I couldn’t invite you in with the house the way it is.”

“Let us give you a hand to clean it up,” said Isobel.

They walked by him into the kitchen. He stood there uncertain of what to do. They had come in the midst of one of his reveries of despair to which he wanted badly to return. Isobel washed cups. Hugh fed the dog while Jack sat by the empty grate.

“You don’t look well,” said Isobel.

“What’s wrong with me!”

She glanced at the red sore in the white of his eye that looked like a dash of Tabasco sauce, she took in the black matted hair, the dirty fingernails, the white cheeks. “Have you been eating?”