Of course, he didn’t want me! Me? He never could have wanted me in a million years. His soul still ached for the golden Catherine. I was just a stupid lacklustre girl and he would never have to stoop to wanting a stupid lacklustre girl. My vanity embarrassed me. I’d never felt such humiliation – even being dissected in the parochial house hadn’t been this bad. I was an idiot and I burned with the shame of letting him see that for a good two minutes I’d thought of myself as someone worth having.

I heard him in the washroom at the back. He had to go to the McCourts’ house, respects had to be paid. The half-door swung shut and the lights of the tractor swept around the little room before he headed up the hill and left me all alone again. Around this time up at The Hill, Daddy, Mammy, Matthew and me would be saying a few decades of the rosary and a Prayer for Peace before she makes the last hot drink of the day. Will they miss me? Will they wonder how I’m doing? I can live without the prayers but I venture up into the empty kitchen and put the small milk pan on the yellow range. When it hit the boil I poured equal measures of sugar and Camp Coffee into it. It’s the only way it can be swallowed.

That night when I lay in the pitch-dark it floated down into me and took up residence in my chest. Daddy had given me away and now here I was, all by myself. There was someone living inside me and I still felt alone. She – I knew she was a girl – had been with me for nearly three months and she was no company at all. John Johns’s words hit me like stones again and again until I felt bruised. He didn’t want to know me, he didn’t want to hear me, he didn’t want to lay eyes or hands on me. He had managed to make me feel less than nothing. He’d outdone Mammy’s lifetime work in five minutes. That was good going. He had nothing to lose by marrying me because the amazing Catherine had his heart in her back pocket and he hadn’t stopped to consider that he had ruined my chances of landing Joe Loughrey.