A new day began. Stationary above the green sea, a wisp of cloud hung below the level of the house. Boats stirred beyond. He walked down the white road that was fenced and wired on each side. Sheep sheltered in a dyke from the wind. The road turned yellow and creamy. Suds flew up over the cliffs from the Seagull’s Rock. Rain fell, beating a left-right dance rhythm on the surface. The cloud dispersed into thin air.

Seaweed glided past.

Rain went by the window in waves. He cleaned each room to find his way to the front room again. A great fondness went through him for the dozen or so pictures – the Madonnas, the Rose of Mystica, the Child of Prague, Our Mother of Perpetual Succour, the Crucifixion – that lined the walls. A farmer dropped off twenty plastic bags of turf. Then, that weekend, Thady appeared with cement and sand on a tractor. Jack and Thady started to break up the damp, cracked floors with a sledge hammer. By the light of a tilley-lamp Jack stood in the evenings mixing concrete with a spade from sea sand and gravel. The line of mountains on the mainland hardened into a deep evening blue. The mountains went perfectly still. The air filled with last birds. Then, in his new home, her smell came on the breeze again.

Thady rode off into the dark.

He began to imagine that they would meet on a certain street in Dublin. He planned the encounter meticulously. He could see the street in his mind’s eye – the parked cars, the green canopies over the two Italian cafés, the windows of the various clothing manufacturers filled with curtains and fabrics for dresses, the mannequins wearing orange and blue, the antique shop below the level of the street, the iron railings, the newspaper seller under his canvas, the sandwich bar, the wet pavement. She would have just come out of the pub he was walking towards. They would be taken unawares. They would look at each other as they had the day he’d stepped off the train in Belfast.

Then, as he began to imagine her smile, the vision faded.

For he did not know what would happen then. His stomach was giddy as he saw her falter.

One day he walked the road from Aghadoon, past the thatched cottages, the wreck of a car sitting snug in a small quarry, the Church of the Holy Family, the mobile homes behind brick walls, and slipped on to the Ballina bus. As they drove east his conviction grew that he would meet Catherine at the corner of South William Street in Dublin. As he sat in the train, snippets of their life together went through his mind. The most outrageous things and the most banal.

When he alighted in Connolly Station he had no doubt that she would be there as he imagined her.