He shut the cupboard door on the money. Well, now, what should he be doing? It was still daylight – the evenings were stretching, each, as his father used to say, three steps of a cock longer than the last. He was tired, and there seemed to be nowhere to sit down. The place was littered with papers; even the armchair was filled with them. A pity it wasn’t dark; he could have gone to bed. Well, why not go up? Lie down for a spell, have a little rest.

He began to climb the stairs, slowed down by the strangeness of it, going to bed in daylight. He pulled the curtains and began to undress, conscious of the sound of a tractor in a distant field, of voices passing on the road.

The sheets were cold, and he turned sideways, drawing up his legs to conserve his meager store of warmth. Sleep seemed far away. His mind went back to the wedding, to the girl, the way she had knelt before the altar, eyes lowered as she murmured the words after him. He had looked down at her eyelids. They were a nice shape, rounded. Was it the same pleasure one got from breasts, looking at them? At the way they pressed against the top of the prie-dieu, tight under the white lace. And now, loosened in some hotel bedroom...

God! He turned over violently in the bed, feeling for his breviary, but it wasn’t there. He had left it downstairs in the kitchen. He should get up and go down for it, but he could not make the effort; his mind, sharpened though it was, could not drive his sluggish body. He lay there and deliberately sought for something he could direct his mind toward, not a prayer, because that did not always work, just something ordinary he could concentrate on. Cold! Yes, that was it.

What was the coldest thing he remembered? A memory floated up, forgotten till now. He was a child, about five or six years old, and he was lying on his side in a bed, a thick featherbed, the visitor’s bed in Rosnagree, which he and the other children sometimes used to bounce on. Uncle Joseph, the old priest, was in the room, preparing to undress. He smiled at this, remembering his surprise when the old man took off his jacket and he saw that everything was not black underneath – in fact, that his uncle wore a striped shirt like his father’s. Underneath the shirt was a woolen vest. The boy watched the old man peel it off. Below the sunburned circle of skin around the neck, the skinny body was almost transparently white.