O’Muichin lit the fire, left a cup of tea at the door of the Sergeant’s study, and leafed through various books – Stray Thoughts on Reading by L. H. M. Soulsby, Maisie’s Sea Gardening and Catherine’s The Liverpool Poets in the Penguin Modern Poets series – till the girls came down. When they did not appear he went out to weed in the garden and throw grain to the geese. The girls were slow in coming because they were talking in that languorous manner of people privileged to be alive without knowing it.

Theirs was a world of sensation only.

It was Catherine’s turn to tickle her sister. This always took ages, for Sara was a great pleasure-seeker, and she would make promises way and beyond what she could carry out just for a few extra moments of leaving her body for that other body where the senses raised their perceptions like deer. First she lay on her stomach, then Catherine touched her neck, tiptoed down her spine with her fingertips, flattened her palms at the sudden curve of her sister’s rump, then halted in the curved hollow at the bottom of Sara’s spine. Sara turned over on to her back. “Just a little more,” she said. “You’re very demanding,” said Catherine. Now Catherine, thinking of something far removed from what she was at, traced her sister’s breasts and upper arms. Then she’d consider a woman’s body, knowing where each pleasurable stress lay. With a selfish edge of narcissism, she’d frustrate her sister. Hurrying, she sifted at the edge of places then flitted away, and looking out of the window, with one hand she tipped her sister’s temples lightly while with the other she teased across her thighs, and with both hands, lastly, she felt the roots of the hair on her head.

“That’s enough,” said Catherine. “I’m getting up.”

Sara came on to her elbow. “Could you pass me my socks?” she said, and then, as she pulled them on her beneath the sheets in the bed, she ventured idly: “I met a man raking seaweed into clumps below at low tide. He was very handsome. ‘Are you local?’ I asked him. ‘No, Leitrim,’ he replied. ‘We’re all mad in Leitrim.’ Then he broke into a merciless laugh.”

“Leitrim?” said Catherine. “I doubt that he’s attractive.”

“He is,” Sara said confidently, “in a way.”

“The Leitrim man always gives me the same feeling as the single red bloom of the geranium down in the porch,” replied Catherine. “I can’t bear to look at it without feeling sad and wanting to run away at one and the same time.”

“I like him.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” said Sara.