‘We are the terminal cases now, is what we tell ourselves. We’d a smashing woman, died of cancer coming on a year ago. She was a fine woman and she was a very gifted poet. First of the set to go. That’s the joke now. We are in it to the end.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Eileen said.

‘Don’t be,’ Tom said. ‘That’s life. But it doubles your resolve in some way, do you know?’

Eileen said nothing, because he didn’t require an answer. Tom took a drink of his beer.

‘That boy can play something beautiful. You must be proud,’ Tom said, and Eileen thought that even though Danny was good, he was perhaps not so good that it merited this string of compliments. Eileen figured the man was just being agreeable, decently filling the silence, the way you had to with a stranger.

‘What else would I be?’ Eileen said.

THE SILVER COAST

Lorna watched the men through the glass. The garden was covered in snow, depleted of detail and distilled to its outlines, like a sketch of a garden on tracing paper. Her husband Barry and son Luke were out there, grappling with the ­rust-­coloured carcass of the Christmas tree Barry had finally decided to toss. It was just after one in the afternoon on a bright, cold Thursday at the ­tail-­end of January. Lorna was standing at the kitchen counter, making coffee for the other women.

She could see the men’s breaths clamouring in the air above their heads as they exerted themselves. She could see the shallow blue dimples of their prints wandering in sloppy adjacency across the snow and she could see, between their sets of prints, the jagged gutter cut by the tree’s trunk and the litter of dark needles that had dropped from the tree like a line of gunpowder.

Luke, who had come to the funeral mass, was still in the charcoal overcoat his grandmother Anne had got him for his thirteenth birthday. The coat was the most ­grown-­up piece of clothing Luke owned, but when he was in it, it only emphasised his slight shoulders and long abashed neck. There were shaggy flecks of snow clinging like burrs all up the arm and back of it

Barry was dressed like shit, in a nubbled hoodie, pulverised sweatpants and grimy Tims. He looked like someone on day release. Which in a sense he was. Barry managed the bar of the Killala Bay Hotel in town. Thursday was his day off. He tended to sleep in late, usually with a hangover, and do as little as he could get away with. Not today. As soon as they had got back to the house, Barry had been after Luke to come help him get rid of the tree.