“Well, you frightened him away anyhow,” Sara laughed. She came abruptly to her feet, as was her habit, drew her dress above her knees, and checked the back of her calves for dirt kicked up from the road. “She said to me,” and Sara mimicked her mother, “that I was ‘to do nothing that Catherine wouldn’t do’. I said: ‘Ara Mammy, I don’t like men.’ ‘Aye, well,’ she said, ‘but you can’t keep away from them either.’”

“You’re perverse,” said Catherine.

“Don’t think I don’t see you at the window looking.”

“I do not!”

“Men are right about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the quiet ones you have to watch,” she said.

A fine bristle soon appeared on Catherine’s skull. With delight she watched her hair grow back in blond tufts and wisps. The mixture delighted her. It grew together first at the back of her head. It seemed to take for ever. She sat in a chair in the garden and Sara rubbed ointment into her scalp to hurry it on.

With the return of her hair, she felt ashamed of how much she had withdrawn, but she was not ashamed in the least to discover that she had a woman’s vanity. Hair made her feel sane.

And as she returned to normality, she pledged herself to her mother, saying I’ve been too long in mourning for my father, and the thought of the woman upstairs, with the marble chips gripped tight in her clenched fist as she slept, made the daughter flinch with an ache of painful nostalgia and guilt.

Her scalp in this disorder, Catherine bravely answered the door to Jack Ferris. He stood there with a pair of football boots swinging round his neck and a flashlight in his hand.

“She’s not here.”

“Sara?”

“Who else?”

“You’re looking well.”

“Oh but you have a nerve.”

“It’s the same with a beard. Every time I shave, the harder it gets.” He felt his chin. “Not that I have much anyway. When I was young I shaved my legs. And begod if nothing grew back at all.”

He laughed at himself. He had hair that looked as if it had been dyed jet black, and sleepy eyes, mischievous, of a pale sensual grey. They seemed fixed beyond what he was looking at till he took you into view, and he was saying – none of this is true, it’s all absurd.

“There’s a storm coming,” he said.

“Is there?”

“An almighty one. From the northwest.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

“Do.”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

He dusted his knees with his cap and sat down, looked about him and hummed a bar. Could it be him? she wondered.

“Sara is in Belmullet, I think,” she said sharply. “As a matter of fact I thought she was with you.”

“Ah.” He nodded. Continued humming.