“Take a taste of this,” he said, picking some wild leaves. They both walked on chewing.

“My God,” shouted Catherine, “is this stuff poisonous?”

Suddenly he realized that his mouth was red hot. They stopped and started spitting furiously.

“I thought,” he said, “they would taste of lemon.”

“Sometimes, you know,” she said, “I despair of you.”

It was a time of big seas.

At night they spoke of Scotland in the bar.

He did not, on wakening, put out a hand to touch her.

Through his mind raced all the bad things. The light of the morning reached into the room full of a wicked shining truth. They were bodies in a pure stupor. If she touched him, he would freeze. For he felt his body to be shamelessly packed with sweat, urine and excrement. Catherine sat up, gripped her knees and looked towards the window. Then she looked at him a second. He wanted to disappear and come back in another shape to please her. But she misunderstood this fear and self-loathing. She leaned over, nevertheless, and kissed him. But then turned tetchy at his lack of response.

She got out of bed, went to the toilet, then sat looking out of her window. Eventually she went about her business of half-dressing.

She began to test him, seeing how far she could go saying wild things, then wilder things, things that once used to unsettle him, make him dizzy. In her melancholia she looked dated and a little odd. She talked indecently of all his friends, and her lovers, and the village folk. He, not to be outdone, continued the same comical, slanderous talk. His hands joined between his knees like an embarrassed schoolboy, he told her that he often took her erotic asides as somehow a slight on himself.

“Can we go somewhere together for a holiday – somewhere foreign?” she asked.

“Like where?”

“Anywhere. Majorca. Cyprus – places where normal people go on holidays.”

“You really want to go?”

“It will be good for us. Cheap wine, swimming, sunshine and no wind.”

“OK,” he said.

“But where?” she asked.

“Some place” said Jack, “with a bar.”

“Can we afford it?”

“I’ll have a few bob from the fishing. And there’ll be an advance.”

The next day she booked them into Majorca through a travel agency that was based in a draper’s shop on the Moy.

The night before they were to leave they walked up the town of Castlebar. While she went shopping he sat in the car. She stepped out of a boutique holding a new dress before her for his opinion. He nodded. She leaned out of a shop with a scarf round her head.

As she walked happily up the street towards him holding her new clothes he was overcome with sentiment. She kissed his eyes. In a bar in Crossmolina they had their first drink in a few days. She put her arm over his shoulders.