Birdie has done this before. Many times. Though sometimes the bird is not so lucky. Sometimes all she finds on the doorstep are the dead feathers and bones that the cat left behind.

Is it their poor eyesight? she wonders. Or maybe it’s the snow and the cold and the lack of drink that gets to their little brains and makes them do stupid things. Careless things. But she’s glad she found him in time.

She closes the kitchen door and returns to the hall.

The robin is safe in the sock and she is safe in her house. Everything is in its place.

The little waterfont inside the hall door with the picture of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the bottle of holy water in the shape of Our Lady. Her seventeen coats under the stairs. Her shoes on the shelf and the shopping bags and umbrellas hanging from hooks on the wall under the stairs. The weather barometer in the hall where every morning she can still see the Vet tapping the glass with his knuckle.

She closes and locks all the doors. She locks the dining-room door, and the kitchen door. She bolts the front door. Three bolts. And ensures the new Chubb lock is secure. She ascends the stairs, which were first covered with green linoleum, and then with red carpet, and finally after the Vet died, in a grey wool, that is still fresh and clean and on which she has been ascending and descending on her bum for years.

She notices the name plate for the house, ‘Ard Aoibheen’, the Sweet Hill, that was wrought in Dublin, and fell off the front gate ten years after the Vet died, and which she left one day on the window ledge halfway up the stairs, not knowing what else to do with it. She notices the picture of the Vet with his high forehead and his cap and gown taken when he received his degree many years before she met him.

The pictures of Gussie on his First Holy Communion. Everything is in its place.

At the top of the landing four pairs of ancient spectacles rest on the dressing table. And the Child of Prague, which Gussie took the head off with a pillow when he was six.

And the bathroom with its soaps and jars and mugs of old toothbrushes, and a jumbo box of Radox. And Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck shampoo bottles from the time of Gussie’s childhood. Her hot press with its sheets and blankets or what has not yet been stolen by invisible men who come still with regularity and deplete her supplies.

What does it all mean now?

The dressing table in her bedroom, with its powders and puffs, its towels and ointments. A faded picture of the Virgin Mary framed and hanging on the wall.

Her bedside lamp, the base of which she made one year at a wickerwork class run by the Widows’ Association, after the Vet died and people said it would help her get over him.