He knew she wasn’t coming, and it didn’t matter that she wasn’t coming. This, too, had to be gone through. He woke up in the chair beside the dead fire in the kitchen of the cottage and saw the bottle of vodka on the table. Where it came from he could not answer. He saw a leaf pinned neatly to the window like a musical note. From somewhere inland it had been blown against the pane during a storm, and stuck there.

He filled a glass and sat. A blast of cold damp air hit the back of his upper arms. The leaf stayed pinned to the window, marking the highest note the storm had reached. At the thought of the loneliness ahead he’d grow dizzy and euphoric. There’d be lumbering and dissolving. The closed door. The damp carpet. Sootfall.

Walls running with condensation. Then, for a moment, the memory of corncrakes. Then one day no corncrakes.

34. Happiness

34

Happiness

He painted the gables of the house with lime and cement, and scraped the weeping walls in the bedroom down to the original stone. Early October light came crashing across the silent sea towards the door. His cottage seemed from a distance to be riding the waves. The air was like champagne in the north wind. He installed a bucket for a toilet in one of the abandoned sheds in the back garden.

He came down one morning and discovered a rat sitting in the embers of the fire. The rat flew up the chimney. In the warm ashes he found two potatoes, well chewed, that the rat had carried over from the vegetable box.

When he opened the door, a wild cat was lying on her back, dusting herself.

“That’s right,” he said to the cat.

He travelled back to Leitrim for a weekend. Dr Ferris and Ma Ferris and himself ate Sunday dinner in a hotel in Bundoran. From across the street came the sound of a bingo announcer calling out numbers, while at the other end of the dining room a bunch of Ireland soccer fans were singing.

“You’re not drinking,” said his mother.

“No.”

“That’s good. It will do you good.”

“How is that girl Catherine?”

“She’s fine.”

With his father hunched over the wheel and his mother perched precariously in the passenger seat, they drove him back dangerously and slowly to Belmullet in the roaring Volkswagen. Cassettes slid along the floor. An accordion in the boot wheezed as they took long corners. The moment they arrived, Daisy leapt out of the car and sat at the gable end of the cottage. The cat came over and perched beside him.

“I’ll keep the dog,” Jack said.

His mother peered into the house.

“They have terrible lives in Mayo, glory be to God,” she said sadly. “No light and no electricity. It makes a body think Leitrim is not so bad. And how is poor Thady?”

“Fine mother.”