He eventually came to a place where the road diverged and became two. He stopped for a moment, noticing that here, perhaps because of carts or barrows turning round, or travellers on foot changing their minds, piles of stones had been cast loose from the road’s surface, and he saw these loose white stones as a kind of unexpected treasure, yielding itself to him in this dawn which seemed to have no date nor hour attached to it, but to be quite outside time.

He bent down and began to fill his pockets with the stones, holding each one lovingly in his hand before placing it inside his coat. Then he looked up and wondered which arm of the road he should take. His hands caressed the stones. He listened intently for some instruction inside him, bidding him go this way or that, but received none. So he closed his eyes and walked blindly on down the left-hand fork and after a while he realised that the sound of the Sadong River was now very loud. He could tell that this was a river far swifter, far more heartless in its intent than any he had known in England. He could imagine its wild passage, round boulders, down rapids, swirling in eddies, throwing spray towards the sky, carrying all in its embrace.

When he reached the river’s edge, he touched the stones in his pockets once more, choosing to see an affiliation between them and himself: bodies made from the earth, tenacious in the way they clung to it, but susceptible to storms, to displacement and destruction and to man’s incessant journeying this way and that.

Before lowering himself into the river Valentine Ross briefly considered whether he should remove his boots, but he knew this consideration to be futile and foolish. For there was only this now: a man and a surging river, and of the man he wished there to be no trace.

SNOWBERRIES

She had been named for the world of dreams, but also for the ash tree and when she walked past a little grove of these, on her way to school in Dublin, she saw that they appeared dead, with their few remaining leaves the colour of rotten plums and hanging like rags from the branches. When she got home, she said to her mother, Kathleen, ‘the ash trees are all dead’ and Kathleen replied, ‘of course they are. Everything dies in winter.’

Aisling felt that she was dying. She was back in her old, sad room, with Maire’s bed just two feet away from hers, a bed kept clean with fresh linen, quite as though Maire would walk in one evening and lay her head down on the white pillow.

At school, she found it difficult to work. All she could think about was the house on the western shore and the little pen where Iris was kept, knowing that by now it might all be blanketed with snow and that the goats, who had no fleeces on them like sheep, might die of cold.