And then his wife has run to the other side of the room. She is holding the children, hiding them from him, and he wonders how women can always be this way, so incessant and afraid. Perhaps she is still angry at him that he hasn’t cut down that ash seedling, and then he remembers.

‘Eilís is my eldest daughter,’ he says.

He chuckles a little, and leans his head against the cool wall; it was just a momentary lapse of forgetting. It is funny because his greatest fear was always losing his memory like his mother had. In the end she couldn’t recognise her own family, and now it is happening to him and it is not so bad. I have even forgotten my fear of forgetting, he thinks. What strange blessings drink gives you, and women cry all the time. I have not done too bad a thing, and, besides, it was brought on by the ale. He remembers that he had begun drinking not only so he could feel lighter and more amused, but so he would not have to continue, while at the same time becoming impervious to the consequent guilt of not having to continue.

‘Why should I have to invent solutions, where there are none?’ he calls to Aethelburga. ‘Why should I comfort where there is only nonsense? There remains the sickness; and there is no thinking around it or through it. It is either survived, or it is not.’

Whatever insight glided over him has left, and he forgets the gist of what he was trying to say. The house is completely silent, more so than he can ever remember it being; and his vision is not blurred any more, but it is short and narrow, requiring concentration. This is a dark house. He sways slightly.

‘Did you ever consider,’ he says, ‘even for one moment, that there were perhaps no justifications left to not be drunk?’

She does not reply, and he realises that until the ash seedling is cut down nothing will be right between them. He looks up at the scythe, and sees it is covered in dark fluids, blood, a flap of jagged skin and some strands of golden hair, and it comes to him why the house is so quiet. Perhaps, he thinks, it has been days since she told him Eilís was sick.

‘Will you not answer me?’ he asks.