“Aye,” she said, “the poor soul.”

Without going beyond the front door, she sat back into the car, disdainful and perplexed.

“I don’t know what took you out here,” she said.

“When the weather gets good we’ll come and see you,” the doctor said. His mother gave her son a polite nod as the Volkswagen, with a blast of its exhaust, pulled away into the cloudy evening.

It was raining. Daisy, who was now slightly arthritic, had grown a wizened grey beard. He perched and tried to scratch himself. He lifted a back paw awkwardly to a downcast ear, shook uncontrollably and fell on his rump. He howled lonesomely.

With Daisy by his side, Jack walked up to the forts on the cliffs above Aghadoon.

The sea had risen wide and high. The moon came and went behind clouds that dotted the blue sky like bruises. He missed the landscape even as he walked through it, as much as he had missed her while she was with him. All the weight of the responsibility had somehow shifted to him.

The spiritual numbness was entire. He had handed his entire being over to the care of another. He should not have done it. The centre had shifted. The islands were leaving.

Each morning he woke early, tried to stifle his panic, then walked out the back for a while, set the fire, fed the dog, breakfasted, washed in a bucket of warm water, and read in front of the fire.

At the sound of the post van coming up through the valley he was on his feet. He had already written to Catherine. He had written a very businesslike letter saying he would light a fire once a week in her house. He told her where he had left her key. He described the cottage he’d bought. He wished her well in the forthcoming play. I’ll not intrude, he wrote to reassure her.

And I’m sober, he wrote. Let’s grow old and sober together.

But no post from her came. The van would swing away well before it reached the road that led to his house.

A dead seagull fell at the back window. A crate containing two rotten dogfish was left at the back door. What were these signs? Each night he masturbated, and thought of her masturbating; he imagined her fingers flicking her groin at a giddy tempo till he came with a low moan that made the old dog on the mat before the fire start to howl.

“Aisy, Daisy,” he shouted from the bedroom.

Meanwhile he waited for word. But nothing came. Once under a stone at the pier of the gate he found a subscription request from a missionary group in Africa addressed to the previous owner of the cottage. That was all.