He crossed to her bedside and stood there. She looked at him with a trace of a smile on her lips, her eyes brighter than he had ever noticed them before, her cheeks more lined and sunken than he had ever noticed them either.

‘Tom,’ she said again, and to his astonishment she held her arms out, wanting him to come closer to her. She repeated his name, and then he felt the wrinkled skin of her face on his cheek, and her lips kissing him, as softly and as warmly as his mother did when she said goodnight. Her hands held on to his shoulders, her grasp tightened around him. ‘Say goodbye to me, Tom,’ she whispered, but he didn’t say anything, fearing that if he did she’d let him go.

In the dark of another night, thoughts and memories mingled. They ran about and would not flow together. Sunshine was warm on her forehead. She watched her breath on the chill air. She heard her laughter when two men on horseback rode among the furniture of the drawing-room, two rakes from Mallow or wherever. A band played in the alcove on the stairs, her own feet danced. Only I had bad luck a week ago, the familiar loops of Kathleen Quigley’s handwriting reminded her.

As fragile as the veins of a fallen leaf, all of it would be shattered by the same idle touch that had reached for her husband and her son and her grandchildren’s mother, for Linchy, and for Dowley in the end. Wouldn’t you wonder how a person could get the way Corny Dowley was when he could have made some girl a decent husband? But I’m telling you the truth saying there’s no hard feelings. There’s no one doesn’t know you were always goodness itself to Kathleen Quigley. He had lain in wait at Lahane crossroads, for men whom in other times he might have smoked a cigarette with. He had lain in wait on the billiard-hall steps, and become the victim of his own trap. His mother walked out into the sea on the day of his funeral.

A fire burned in the bedroom, as it always did during the winter months. The lamp on the dressing-table cast a soft, yellow light. For more than seventy years she had slept in this room. The son she had outlived had been conceived and born here. Her tears had dampened the yielding warmth of the bed she lay down in now, tears of pleasure often, ‘I’m so sorry, Brigid,’ she tried to comfort when Brigid had wept also, ‘I’m so very sorry.’ The remains had lain with a sheet drawn over them, one sheet replaced by another because the blood still oozed. Mightn’t it appease the conscience if you sent a few shillings? But conscience had stayed to mock, and to insist upon as its greater due.

‘Mrs Rolleston.’