So, once, he had stood, looking at a note in his hand, not knowing what to do with it. Five pounds? Hardly; such a sum would have seemed impossible in those days. One pound, perhaps? Or was it ten shillings? Trying to remember, he suddenly caught the smell of geraniums, an imprisoned smell, and remembered the airless front hall of Rosnagree.

“Ten shillings?” he could hear his mother’s voice beyond the half-open door of the kitchen. “Would you mind telling me what you’d want ten shillings for?”

There was a low murmur as Frank replied, embarrassed, knowing that his younger brother was waiting outside the door. How old was Frank then? Twenty-eight? Thirty? He himself was twenty-six, home from England on holidays. He wanted to call out, “Frank, it’s all right, I have it, let me give it to you!”

But his mother’s voice went on, “The races, indeed! And what about the marigolds that ye were to thin? Are ye going to leave Petie and the young Higginses the run of the place?”

“They’ll carry on all right.”

“Don’t I know the way they’ll carry on, making a clean sweep when there’s no one here to keep an eye on them.” And then she lapsed into that tone of self-commiseration which always set Tom Conroy’s teeth on edge. “Mother of God, isn’t it a fright to have the minding of ye all.”

But it wasn’t true, he wanted to shout, it just wasn’t true. Not about Petie and the young Higginses, who crawled along the drills with sacks tied about their knees, their hands scored with the warm, dry, reddish clay. They would all work the better, knowing that her tall, black figure might at any moment come accusingly from the copse at the end of the field. Come on, Frank, he wanted to call out, don’t mind her. I’ll give you the ten bob.

As if he could hear, Frank said, “All right, so, I’ll go and ask Tom for it.”

“Oh, indeed you won’t. You will not, then, you’ll do nothing of the kind.”

And next moment he could hear her climbing the dark enclosed stairs to the room under the rafters where she had moved after his father’s death. In the old days, it used to be Kate’s room. Sometimes, on a wet day, when the rain was drumming on the slates just above their heads, Kate and Owen and he played hide-and-seek above the rafters. He remembered the rough planks barking his knees, the warmth behind the chimney where he hid, holding his breath, while he listened to them crawling nearer. He was conscious of the solidity of Kate’s whitewashed room below, against which the wind flung itself like waves against the hull of a ship. It was exciting to be there, at the very center of the sheltered life of the house.