‘I’ll take them downstairs,’ Patty says in the pink-distempered bedroom where Sarah’s death has taken place and where her diaries are stacked beneath the window-shelf.

‘Did she want them destroyed, Patty?’

‘She only said we could when we had read them. If we wanted to.’

Tom nods. Both of them are saddened by their loss. There was a tidiness about the household as it had become: for the last few years it has seemed right that there should be the three of them, the family gone and its attendants left.

‘She had a lovely hand,’ Patty remarks as she gathers up the diaries. Already some entries have been read. Patty has a picture in her mind which she did not have before: of the plain child growing up in a cheerless rectory, of a teacher in a boarding-school, of a woman painfully in love. In the kitchen she releases the pulley that keeps the drying-rack suspended, and picks the garments off it one by one. Folding each as she does so, she stacks them ready for ironing. It is odd, she thinks, that Sarah Pollexfen should have wanted all that to be known.

In the town on the mainland, people learn of the death. Esmeralda, youngest of the Coyne daughters, hears the news in Meath’s, while filling a wire basket with groceries. It will make a difference, she considers. Tom will be affected: it will be Tom’s house now, just as the land is Tom’s Mr O’Hagan hears the news and remembers Sarah Pollexfen entering the kitchen with a tray while he and the ferryman toasted Villana Rolleston on her wedding day. Sister Conheady, who suffered a stroke a month ago, attempts to cross herself but cannot. Her face has frozen into a tranquil smile which does not reflect the nature of her thoughts. I was uncharitable, her thoughts accuse. She should have given the child the books and only smiled, never writing what she did: she envies Sarah Pollexfen her release. ‘God rest the soul,’ Mrs Moledy remarks to the postman who rings her bell to inform her, knowing she has had a connection with the family. Mrs Moledy—a great age now—lives in the basement flat of what used to be her boarding-house, which she sold in 1959 to an insurance company. Two streets away, in the offices of Harbinson and Balt, Eugene Prille attends to the sparse legalities that the death necessitates.

Her skin tightens in the pink-distempered bedroom, her blood is as cold as water. The rictus that shadows the slackened jaw is pressed away by the woman who has come to lay the body out. Familiar obsequies are observed, arrangements made.

‘A good soul,’ the undertaker murmurs on the way upstairs to take his measurements.

‘Yes, she was that.’