‘When those brutes of soldiers shot down Dowley they came over to tell us. Delighted with themselves.’

‘Mrs Rolleston—’

‘As of right again, Dowley had been hunted, this time to the kill. That same week the engagement was broken off.’

I felt myself shaking my head without knowing why I was doing so. I tried to contradict without knowing what I was contradicting. I said my brother and Villana had been engaged and then decided not to be. It was a usual thing to happen.

‘No, Sarah. No, not at all. Your brother and Villana turned away from all they felt for one another, and perhaps they had to. For how could their children play in that same garden and not ever be told of what had festered so horribly in a wound? How could the reason for the tragedy on the avenue not ever be revealed? Was it to be kept from them that the cornering of Cornelius Dowley on the steps of a billiard-hall was an irony and a repetition? Was it to be kept from them that his mother walked out into the waves? And that all of it began in the idyll of a lazy summer?’

Her voice went on, speaking now of fate; how her grandchildren and my brother, in luckier circumstances, would have escaped their conscience. Chance had supplied a gruesome plot: in another place and another time they would have grown up healthily to exorcise their aberrations by shrugging them away. She lost the thread of what she was trying to communicate, was incoherent, then spoke again of Dowley’s mother walking into the sea.

‘Can you imagine her, Sarah? That tormented woman begging for the sea’s oblivion? Her husband gone and now her son. Life with a half-wit in a hovel was what she faced. How much nicer, Sarah, the future was for me!’

Again coherence went. She spoke of the dogs there’d been at Carriglas in her time. And then about the day a chaffinch had flown about the drawing-room, and the day the family had posed for the silver-framed photograph in the hall, and the day she’d been glad Lionel was declared unfit for service in the war. Time had tamed the Rollestons, who had come to the island with slaughter in their wake, but time could not be trusted.

‘It never just passes, Sarah. It is always on one side or the other. Women huddled in their corners, children begged, men disappeared. Would their time ever come? How could it come? And yet it did.’