He went to the end of the pier, waved and loosed the final rope. As he stepped on, the boat was already moving.

From her bed she heard someone passing over the gravel. She waited but no knock came. Then she thought, I’ve let myself down. Someone went over the gravel again, and even when she knew it made no sense, she listened on.

If the gate stirred in the wind her heart flitted. If the wind blew a can down the road she listened for the silence that would come and bear his step.

In her mind she saw the wall that crept round the yard at the back of Thady’s house. She saw the turf in the lean-to. The walls stuffed with old green Guinness bottles. The ass’s cock with teats. The ass’s teeth on the top of the wall. Then, all the doors of the house blew open. She shot bolt upright in the bed, and ran downstairs.

But there was no one there.

She fell asleep listening to the rain beating warmly on the galvanize sheds out the back. It was her first time in the house in Corrloch alone, and she found it disturbing. The roar of the waves on the curved beach reached the dwellings with the loud moan of trucks going uphill. Catherine afterwards had a dream in which her mother entered this long room and sat at the edge of a small bed – oh, a long distance away from Catherine. Her mother did not look like her real mother, but inside she was still the same. Then her mother lifted up a saucer, tilted her head sideways and rested her cheek in the groove of the dish. At that moment, Catherine had a great longing to be held. She entered a state of pure physical enchantment which was so intense it woke her.

The rain was slipping off the sill.

It was drumming from the gutters into the rain barrel at the side of the house. The door of the house across the street was open, smoke spun to the southwest and Joe Love was seated at the open door, his hands in his lap, one foot dreaming. Chickens were picking through the gravel in front of him. Then it seemed his house lifted off the ground just about one inch. The impression was of gravity slowly losing its hold. Between the walls of the house and the ground there was now this perfect inch of empty space. There was an inch beneath every leg of his tilted chair. Only the chickens remained earthbound. Catherine made her way laboriously back to bed, thinking, What was that dream that I could feel like this?