Sara was wearing a green high-collared blouse, a wide grey skirt and little white high-heels. Catherine was wearing a dowdy, flower-patterned dress that reached her ankles and, as a gesture towards her mother, stout church-going shoes. Her blond hair, tied with a red scarf, was in a ponytail. She had, Jack knew, beautiful legs. The girls had their faces painted. Their nails varnished. Their minds made up. They sat out the céilí band and the crooner. Only when the country-and-western started did they dance, and then out of fun. Instead of taking a partner, they took to the floor in each other’s arms, slighted the men who asked them out and instead aligned themselves at the foot of the stage with those middle-aged women who danced with each other in a maternal, self-conscious way, with plump elbows held high and shy eyes cast down. Slim and athletic, with a noble head, Catherine danced in a slow shuffle with her sister.

The girls were slumming with the locals.

The lights came and went. The tent rocked unsteadily. At each request for someone from Mullet a cheer arose from the shepherds of Binghamstown. Women were spun away from each other. A stray terrier came in and swinging round on all fours started barking furiously at the band. An odd roar came from someone stopped outside where the long-bearded youngsters were waiting for the real festival to begin. Cigarettes were flicked away into the darkness. Joints passed through various hands. Fires flared along Broadhaven Bay. The outsiders from the east looked at the fires and wondered what they meant. Not knowing increased their euphoria. The sea stood groin to groin against the land. And there was a feeling that the dance music was issuing from a wireless, where the hand had not quite found the station; it was a music gone back in time; other timeless conversations kept breaking in – arguments, the mock grunts of men wrestling, women screeching; it was something dangerous, something pagan; winds from the sea blew the tunes around, loudspeakers seemed to pick up one instrument only – and all this sound woven brashly together travelled across to where a small herd of cattle watched ears-up over a ditch.

It reached the old men who stood for a moment outside the houses on the outskirts of Barnatra watching the bonfires the children had lit. It reached a woman making her way home to her daughter’s. I remember those tunes, she thought. It was a small insignificant human sound, carried this way, carried that way. Sometimes not heard at all even if you listened keenly for it.

The band was playing a Slim Whitman ballad. Then came another air from the past

And most of all I miss her lips

A shade of eiderdown