As the weeks passed, the girl’s mother strode into their consciousness as a single unaligned being. The old relationship was over. Death had put a distance between them. She became a woman who, like them, had been mothered, lived through childhood, experienced adolescence and encouraged courtship. Her womanness shocked them. The secrets Maisie used to tell Jonathan, she now told them. With a cross look in her eye she demanded their attention. Became conspiring and dependent in a flagrant way. Then she’d banish them.

“I miss the birds,” she said. “I miss the geese. It’s not the same.”

It came as a shock to the girls to find that their mother had become cold and withdrawn, even selfish, as she surrendered to the sickness and the identity widowhood had given her.

With the loss of Jonathan Adams they for a while lost Maisie as she struggled with the sentiments expected by the living of those recently bereaved. Neighbouring women they hardly knew called round to offer their condolences. First the Irish language and now death had opened up their house to strangers. The women, who brought warm home-baked bread wrapped in linen, sat by Maisie’s bed talking and celebrating death till all hours. They cursed and called on God to protect them. They spoke of their bowels, they described their menfolk with frightening candour. They spoke of their depressions and the visions they’d seen as children. They brought wild flowers and boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates. Milk was left at the door. Sheets were ironed. Mass cards, which the girls did not fully comprehend, arrived. A boy was sent round to clean the gutters. A man called to get their orders for groceries. Bernie Burke cleaned the chimneys. The travelling shop called twice a week instead of once. And Maisie revelled in the care, after keeping her distance from the outside world since the day she’d married Jonathan Adams.

She began experiencing the pang of remembering the time before the future was cast. She fetched out of the past aunts from Limerick; characters, young lovers she’d known when she was a girl in Rathkeale; nights step-dancing in Askeaton with the RCs; veiled stories told in her own kitchen of Cromwell who had given their Dutch ancestors the land they owned in Ballingrane; she could see herself walking behind her mother through Adare – her voice suddenly changing into that of a vulgar fifteen-year-old. This talk frightened Catherine. These were the stories their father must have heard of a young girl’s first awakening, but hearing them the girls were embarrassed and affronted, for these were seductive tales, stories that had turned into fantasies intended for a man.

Then suddenly would come the change in mood.