Or was it familiar because now he knew himself what the old man had meant, “Why, then, should my own mean so much to me now, and these people nothing? That’s just one of the questions which keep my night’s sleep from me. So little light is given to us.” He thought of the thin, white body with the neck burned brown above the ring of the collar. Had he answered the letter? Perhaps he hadn’t, being too busy with the preparations for his ordination. But what could he have said? What could stop an old man “pondering over problems that will never get anyone anywhere”? As easy cure the wind on the stomach; yes, he remembered that, and the damn tortillas. My God, yes. What could he have said that would have killed the taste of those damn tortillas?

He stopped suddenly at the last paragraph, at the reference to the money enclosed “to help you over these last couple of terms and to lighten the expenses of your mother. I’m sorry it’s not more. I haven’t helped you as I should have, all these years in college.” Slowly he put the letter down, folding it carefully along its creases. Yes, he thought, but of course that’s what I must do. I must get all that money out and give it to someone of the family. That will have to be done. I’m going to clear it all out, not now, in the morning. I’m going to close up that cursed hole for good and nail the door shut on it.

But who is there to give it to? Jimmy? No, he could see Jimmy looking up at the sun, smiling, confident of the camera’s click. No, not Jimmy. Not Frank, either – he would fritter it away. And there was the time when Frank had sat in the railway carriage crossing Wales, with his little notebook, keeping account of the expenses of Owen’s funeral. No, not Frank.

Owen was the only one who should have had it, the only one I would have wanted to have it. But it didn’t come to me in time, and then, when I offered it to Marie, she refused it, rejecting (and no wonder) all that came from the Conroys. But what about... yes, by God, that’s it, what about her two sons, my nephews, Owen’s two sons, whom I haven’t seen since they were babes in arms? Aren’t they entitled to it? Aren’t they the ones who should have had Rosnagree?