‘I suggest,’ he said, now chilled by the atmosphere in the room, ‘that we leave you to think about this – about our taking Maire to England – and that we return tomorrow and you can tell us what you have decided.’

‘I made potato scones …’ said Kathleen from the doorway.

‘They will keep,’ snapped Michael. ‘You leave now, sister, but tomorrow we will discuss the matter I raised in my letter to you, but which you have not mentioned. We will discuss the necklace.’

FORGOTTEN STREETS

Clorinda woke early in her hotel room and, leaving a note under Sir William’s door, went out into the city.

She walked to the river and saw the sun rise in a grey-green sky above the Liffey. As a child, she had liked to come and watch how the fishing trawlers and the merchant ships at anchor there moved all the time in the wind and how they pressed and bumped so closely against each other, as if they craved intimate companionship after their long, lonely voyages at sea.

In the scent of the river and in the sway of the ships – so it seemed to Clorinda – lay all the fabric of her distant past, and she breathed deeply of the salty air and let her eyes dwell on the leaning masts as the sun began to touch them. And it felt to her that here, in this bit of Dublin poised between returning and leaving, she was once again accepted as belonging to the great city and not shunned as one who had betrayed it.

She was grateful for the feeling of happiness and calm which this gave her. She remained a while longer, listening to the cry of gulls, watching life resume on the decks of the boats, as men were chivvied from their cramped sleeping places to swab decks, to sew shrouds, to mend fishing nets or to stow cargo: barrels of beer from the Anchor Brewery, where Michael was employed, bales of sheep’s wool, livestock in crates and cages. She found herself glad of the way the commercial heart of Ireland – a place where suffering seemed, like rank weeds, to take root in every piece of cleared ground – kept stubbornly beating, of the witness it bore to the continuation of life, no matter what might arise to cast it down and make it cease.

And she resolved there and then that, blessed as she now was to be able to ask for Sir William’s help, she would find a solution to the great matter of the necklace. And no, she would not give up her beloved tea rooms! Even in prosperous Bath, the human mind could find itself oppressed by care and sadness. Life was short and cruel. People needed places of sanctuary, islands of warmth and calm. She had opened a door on such a place and she would not close it now.

Later that morning, when they were back in the Bishop Street tenement, confronted now by Michael and Kathleen, but not by the children, who were in school, Clorinda and her fiancé listened quietly while Michael accused his sister of ‘purloining the only thing of value this benighted family has ever possessed’.