A boat broke the water in a pool of sunlight. It lifted on one broad stroke above a bright wave, breathed there a moment, dipped and disappeared. A cheer went up from the crowd. The sight of her plunging on the horizon reassured the onlookers that she was making headway. An old man standing next to Catherine said: “There’s nothing more beautiful. To be up at five in the morning, dawn breaking, and nothing else but the tick a’da engine in the background.”

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“An East German boat was in trouble out there somewhere, but they’re safe now,” he said. They walked back up the road pushing their bikes. They reached a tall hedge that stood incongruous among the bare windswept fields. “Whisht!” he said. They stood in silence listening. “Can you hear them?” They both listened. “Them’s the pigeons of the Coyle brothers. Can you hear them?” He stood on his toes with delight. “They keep hundreds in cages within.”

They stood on the road beside a massive shelter of oleria, escallonia, cordyline palms, griselinia, bamboos, New Zealand flax, mimosa, sycamore, and listened to the miraculous sound of pigeons and doves and guinea hens in a countryside where there are no trees.

In compliance with the cure, Maisie began a daily diet of goat’s milk and goat’s cheese that the two girls bought from some German hippies living on the mainland. Some days later she appeared in the kitchen.

“I think I’ve passed the badness,” Maisie reckoned.

She pronounced herself cured. There was nothing wrong with her at all. There never was. All that summer she had lain in bed, afflicted by nightmares to do with the North. Now she came down in the afternoons, and clucked about the kitchen with such distressing haste that she missed everything she reached for by a fraction. She cooked, some evenings, dishes of extraordinary simplicity: bread-puddings, jam tarts, herring pie. The old Maisie was back.

Time would blow coldly into the room, make Maisie turn, and tip a spoon to her mouth and send her miles away.

She came down eventually, every day, all day, and sewed throughout the mornings, blinked fiercely at her patterns and commenced remembering her years as a cook with Lord Brookborough.

It was true, Maisie did look better.

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve passed the badness. I’m not helpless.” She wiped dust off the photographs of the elderly smiling masons grouped confidently in some wooden Tyrone hall. Her husband, spruce and adroit, beamed at the camera from the back row. He looked older, from a different generation, compared to her. She blew on the silver spoons, and handed each sherry glass to Catherine to hold to the light and see if any specks remained.

“I don’t know what came over me at all,” she said, and shook her head, baffled, disbelieving, and a little pale.