Father Conroy knew she wanted to be pressed further. For twenty years and more she had been waiting, the Conroy dove of peace. Well, she would have to wait longer – the message had to come first from them to him.

“Lovely family we have, Mikie,” he burst out. “Just like the weather this time of year.”

She got up quickly and went out to the back kitchen. He heard her rattling the cutlery on to the table, not a bit like her usual quiet way about the house. After a few moments she came back with a big dish onto which she heaped potatoes from the pot beside the fire. “Sit up, now, to your dinner, the two of you.”

He wanted to explain that it was not what he had meant to say, yet all he could do was to shrug his shoulders defiantly as he followed her to the table in the back kitchen. As he passed the open door of the parlor, he saw that the sheets had been stripped from the chairs within and that firelight gleamed on the tray of bottles and glasses. Damn it, he thought, I don’t care who her visitors are. I’d prefer bacon and cabbage in the back kitchen. And yet, he felt that she should have known he would call, that she should have been ready to talk to him, put herself altogether at his disposal.

As he sat down, bending his leg with care, he called, “Kate!”

“Yes.” She paused in the doorway.

“I’ll tell you what brought me. I was thinking of...” Of the Conroys, he wanted to say, of Papa and Owen and the way things used to be in Rosnagree. But he couldn’t. With Mikie there, he couldn’t bring himself even to say their names. “...of a good feed of bacon and cabbage. There’s no one can serve it up like you.”

“No, Tom,” she said, as if she were agreeing with a child, and slowly she went out, leaving him alone with Mikie.

He looked at his plate, at the thick slices of bacon and the mound of cabbage. Mikie was mashing potatoes, mixing in a big dollop of butter, pouring on the cream. Father Conroy could not bear to watch him (what was wrong with the Donovans, he had always thought, was too high a butterfat content). He kept his eyes lowered and, slicing a potato, ate it dry.

It was close under the tin roof, though the day was cold outside. Somewhere flies buzzed, as in no other house Father Conroy knew; they seemed to winter at the Donovans. The pound of homemade butter was melting in its dish. Outside, under the window, a hen clucked a gentle, noonday clucking. Kate was working in the front kitchen; he could hear the pounding of the rolling pin, then a deep, vaguely dissatisfied sigh, her version of Mikie’s groan.