As the engine revved into life, Sara would look up again, smiling. With her lower lip pulled in over her bottom teeth, she’d ease out the clutch. She’d cradle the steering wheel. The car jumped and cut out. Immediately, she’d turn the key again. Soon, leaping into the air, the old Ford, with its yellow numberplates and rusty doors, would trundle down the road.

“Who is he?” Catherine asked.

“Jack something.”

“Is he, perhaps, not quite articulate?”

“When he condescends to speak.”

“And what do you talk about?”

“Well,” said Sara, “if you must know, he has a passion for dogs.”

“That must be lovely for you.”

“And films and musicals.” She knotted her hands. “Would you like to meet him?”

“No, thank you.”

Catherine, bald and wide-eyed, stayed indoors, refusing ever to go out till her hair had grown. The days she could have gone to the beach she didn’t. The holidays passed as if she were in prison. Sara said it was nerves. The neighbouring women said that alopecia was caused by depression. And Catherine agreed something terrible was happening to her.

But that summer she read many novels. She read Kidnapped, Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick. She read Jane Eyre, and started the first of her many diaries with an account of the Irish-speaker, O’Muichin. She wrote down shocking dreams about love-making, and erotic thoughts which were totally self-centred, and sometimes vituperative descriptions of Mayo people and Catholic towns.

As the weeks passed she grew morose and bad tempered, because life was passing her by.

Her mother could not console Catherine. The pills she was given brought spots in front of her eyes. When one spot cleared another greater one began, sometimes obliterating a whole landscape. She felt that while she slept the spots were spreading across her skin. Her periods lasted for days. She had a sexual disease, she thought. Each morning she checked her breasts, for if spots ever appeared there then life was over. Every few days Catherine shaved her skull with their father’s razor to get the hair to grow again. His razor had shaved him after he died and the first time she used it Catherine saw collected in its sharp teeth the few scraps of beard that had sprouted after death. It still smelt coldly and intimately of him.

All of these things became confused in her dreams: her father’s razor and her baldness.

When she had to, she went up the road with a scarf wrapped twice round her head. Outside, the summer passed like a room illuminated in another house. She saw the others go down to the sea with their towels. The lads pass by with their rods. The car come for Sara. But she remained indoors. She could not bear anyone to see her.

“You’ll get odd,” Sara said.

“Show us your head,” said Lizzie Summers.