Villana lit a cigarette and within a few moments the confined interior of the car filled with tobacco smoke. Finnamore was about to mention the woman’s waving at people, but desisted in case he should seem to be complaining overmuch. Instead he said:

‘We are alone at last.’

Villana closed her eyes again. When she felt the ash of her cigarette warm between her fingers she wound down the window and flicked the cork-tipped inch that remained on to the road. They were to spend this night in Cork, the journey all the way to the Killarney lakes being too long an afternoon’s drive: the Imperial Hotel had been recommended by her husband’s partner as being particularly comfortable. She was glad the ferryman had come to the kitchen and that Haverty’s friend, Mr O’Hagan, had been there. It was good of both of them to have helped in the way they had.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We are alone.’

Miss de Ryal had played the piano in the drawing-room. Quite suddenly there had been the music drifting faintly to the garden, a piece by Schubert, who was the only composer Miss de Ryal ever played. Villana was glad, too, that someone had urged Miss de Ryal to sit down on the old, embroidered piano-stool, as so often she had done in the past. It made things agreeable again after the incident with John James’s woman. There’d been clapping in the drawing-room when a piece came to an end.

A man wheeling a bicycle saluted them. They passed through a village. A woman waved, driving a cow across the road, in through an open gate.

‘I certainly don’t intend to stagnate my days away at Carriglas,’ John James used to say as a boy. And although Lionel had put it differently he, too, had been determined to escape the easy nostalgia of childhood. She herself had never had such feelings.

The car drew in at the hotel Harbinson had recommended. Suitcases were carried to a bedroom, and unpacked. In a drab dining-room they ate the dinner that had been prepared for them.

‘It is an extremely long time,’ Villana said, pushing her knife and fork together, ‘since I spent a night away from Carriglas.’

‘You would have been a little girl.’

He saw her then: in one red dress or another, her plaits of corn-coloured hair, impudence in her eyes when she climbed on to his knees to play with his watch and its chain.

‘Yes, I would have been a little girl.’