She did not return to Rathkeale. Although her father thought she should sell the house and leave now that there was nothing to hold her in Fermanagh, she said she’d wait and see. That year Sara would be finishing her A-levels, the year after that Catherine. Then she’d see. And, as she explained, there was always their retreat in Mullet. After her father was gone, she started immediately into the business at hand.

She wrote away to have her husband’s pension transferred into her name. She opened a filing cabinet in a drawer and marked it Jonathan. Into it went all her correspondence with insurance companies, the Department of Social Security, the Northern Ireland Police Department. Meanwhile she sat out the escalating war in the North and waited for her daughters to finish school. Weeks sometimes passed without anyone calling.

She sold off the geese.

For a period she began regularly attending service with Catherine and Sara in an attempt to meet people again. But everyone, once service was over, withdrew to their houses. The three women were on their own. Then they too stopped going to church. It was not the same thing without Jonathan.

The afternoon Sara finished her last exam, Maisie hired a car to take them all to Belmullet. When they arrived they expected to find the house in chaos. The walls running with damp. Food gone off in the kitchen. The upholstery in the car ripped. Instead, everything had been put in order by Eitne Noone. And Joe Love had come round to light fires. Bernie Burke came down with fish for their tea. The house was just as they’d left it the day they went to the funeral. Now the family cut the grass, aired the house and washed his car that stood outside in the galvanize shed. Somehow, doing all these things gave them the necessary release to mourn.

First Maisie developed asthma and later Catherine went bald. Then both, attended by Sara, stayed on in Mullet to recuperate. It was a great, tall, silent house to be sick in. For a long period of disembodiment and relapse The Dwellings figured in their consciousness as a place perched high on stilts. Added to this was the maddening sound of the crows. The crows were making a battering sound. Hell was outside. The whole day long they feverishly preened themselves on the few small storm-battered sycamores beyond the house, then stopped, looked up suddenly, cawed and began again.

Inside the three women mourned.