Father Conroy gave Marie several openings to speak, but she continued to stare sullenly out of the window. For the rest of the journey Frank stayed drinking in the bar, and they sat looking out into the darkness, which was broken only by the lights of small stations along the north coast of Wales. In the confusion of getting on board the boat, he forgot to ask Frank for an explanation of what was happening, and next day, when the funeral was over, it was too late – the chasm had already opened between him and his family. His mother had not appeared at any time during the funeral. And the Mass, the undertaker’s bill, everything entered in Frank’s notebook, had been paid by Marie out of the money which Owen and she had saved to buy back Rosnagree.

Several times afterward he wrote to her, offering her help, once even enclosing a substantial money order, but she returned his letters unopened. He did not blame her; damn good cause she had to forget the Conroys. Some years later he heard from a priest in Birmingham who had made inquiries for him that she had married again and gone to live in a seaside town in the south of England; he did not trouble her further.

It troubled him now, though, that he could not remember the names of her sons, Owen’s sons, the only sons of the Conroy clan. Perhaps she had told him; if so, he had not taken note of them. It had seemed a small matter at the time, but later it seemed shameful that they should be nameless to him and to the family whose surname they bore. They would be in their twenties now, married perhaps, with children of their own. Did they know about him? Did they know about Rosnagree, which their father would have claimed for them and which now, barren of children, would soon pass into other hands?

Had they even heard its name? And if so, would they know what it meant – Ros na Graidhe, the Grove of the Horses? And even if they knew, would it mean anything to them, who had never seen the old trees on the hill behind the house, the grove which for generations had stood against the north wind and the east. It was in that grove that he had played with Frank and Owen and his sister, Kate. He knew its deep, green, soft-layered places, now primrose-filled, now swept with flurries of leaves. He knew its sounds; he had wakened to them on summer mornings, on stormy nights been held by them at the brink of sleep. It was all Rosnagree to him.

And to them? No, Marie would never have told them. How could she? It meant nothing to her.