Later she watched a thrush with richly speckled breast go shopping in the front garden. A girl in bright blue trousers, swinging a bag, came down the gravel road. Catherine accepted her stare, she hers, they merged. She thought, it’s two days now. He’s got to call. But the days dragged on to three, then four, and still Jack Ferris did not come.

He’s out to destroy me, she thought.

She thought of getting the next bus away from the peninsula, of returning to Belfast. And yet she did not move. The house was growing strange. She sat with her back to the window that looked out on the road. Her stomach filled with cramps. With her back to the window she’d hear someone approach, but she must not turn. She’d urge them on, whoever they were, to the door. And then there would be that wonderful moment of hesitation by the gate. The person stopping. She must not turn for fear of having to acknowledge her despair. She’d entice him further on. It was dangerous. Her heart pounded. Only to hear the step pass. And as it would pass then she would turn to see it had been someone else, and begin again.

I would not keep it up for so long, she thought, if someone was waiting for me.

This waiting, it seemed, went on for ever. So that when the person hesitated and the gate opened around six one evening she had already allowed five figures to pass. The steps go on. The despair set in. I’ve lost him. When Jack knocked on the door she felt she had only imagined it. This human contact was beyond her. It was happening in the past. It could not be reconciled. When the knock was repeated she had to measure each step to the door. The blood filtered from the backs of her hands. And, even when she opened it, his familiar face was like a hallucination. Nor did she know whom he meant when he looked in at her out of the dark and said: “Hallo, Catherine.”

Then, dizzy, she led him in, but, strangely enough, hesitated a moment before she closed the door, as if she were expecting some other, as if he had brought someone else along with him.

When the salmon season ended he took her home to Kilty. In a plastic bag he had two large salmon as a gift for his parents. They were on the road for hours hitching from the treeless bogs of the west of Mayo to the watery small fields of North Leitrim. They passed through a storm on the long sounding-board below Ben Bulben. Stood out of the rain under a birch on the road from Buckode to Rossinver. The smell of silage steamed through the bushes.

“I’m sure your parents will banish me,” she said.