The woman outside lays off screaming, and intensifies her knocking; now using both fists. Conn sits upright in his chair.

‘You are like a hound that’s caught a scent on the downwind,’ Gertrude says. ‘But this urgency you feel, it is just youth. Something is coming, no doubt, and what will, will, yes; but we must nurture our peace while there is peace to be enjoyed. I am old enough, and have borne witness enough, to know that it is you and I, sitting across from one another in peace that is the rarest of events. Yes, to a young boy like you this vigil we share may seem eternal, but every now and again, eternity ends, and it is not always a good thing. These events are berries, ripening in their own time. We should await autumn’s chill lest we pluck unripe fruits; otherwise children’s bellies do ache, and perhaps little lives are lost.’

Full of volubility from the story she has been ceaselessly telling, her words are still excessively poetical. She is long drunk with their frisson, the words crackling against one another for days, breeding new, expressive images, and she is still somewhat dazed by the tapestry of her own narration, full of thick metaphor and rich meaning that she knows, without understanding it fully, Conn has, in some way, felt.

‘I would never, of my own volition, open such a door in such a time,’ she says, ‘because in times like this, no matter how sick, men become very lecherous creatures.’

‘I beg pardon,’ Conn says, outraged, ‘but I would not believe it.’

‘You would not, because you are a gentle-hearted boy who is at this stage, as close to being a lamb as he is to being a man.’ Here, the knocking intensifies, and Gertrude must raise the pitch of her voice, ‘Still, you have a cock hanging under your navel and it will mature, and cocks, though very different in the nature of the diseases they harbour and the unborn children they disperse, still they all only want one very similar thing.’

‘A wife?’

‘Eventually, any type of hole suffices.’

Conn realises they are talking at cross-purposes, and he doesn’t fully understand what she is saying.

‘It is a woman at this door, not a man, no?’ he shouts. ‘I have not much experience in these matters, but I have seen a single ram attack whole flocks of ewes and make quick work of twenty or thirty in a morning, but I have never seen a ewe go at a ram in a similar manner.’

‘Well,’ Gertrude shouts, ‘have you ever seen a ewe without a ram far behind her?’

Conn puts his hands on his cheeks and thinks. ‘I have not.’