Carriglas, November 3rd, 1968. ‘D’you remember my sick hen?’ Villana suddenly said at dinner, and in fact I did not at first remember and had to think for several minutes. Damp has spread on the ceiling of the bedroom that was Mrs Rolleston’s. Patty and I moved the dressing-table from beneath it. I put away the ivory hairbrushes and the scent bottles, which have remained there since December 1931. I wonder if anyone will ever use that scent again. Perhaps one day there will be an auction in this house, and someone then may buy these small remains.

As a tapestry of domestic detail, the years that separate Tom and Patty from 1931 are spread before them in the record that has been kept. In other upstairs rooms bedclothes are taken from the mattresses, furniture covered. A crack occurs in the cast-iron of the kitchen range. Villana drives the big black Renault, its hood drawn back in summer. Haverty climbs on to the roof to install an aerial for a wireless set; one autumn night a strawberry tree slumps against its neighbour. There are references to the Shannon Scheme of electrification, to Lionel’s wartime crop of sugar beet, to the snow of 1946, Arthritis affects John James’s leg. In the drawing-room the piano Miss de Ryal played on the afternoon of the wedding slips out of tune. Dawn lightens yet another sky. Curtains are drawn against another night, and then another.

There is hardly a word that is not easily read, no error of spelling or grammar remains uncorrected. The handwriting is like the woman: the flow of prose recalls her also. Patty has forgotten that when first she came to Carriglas she assumed Sarah Pollexfen to be Villana’s sister, until Brigid explained that she was not. Neither Patty nor Tom has known of her attachment to Lionel. Sarah Pollexfen was a woman who went about the house; her story, of duty and unrequited love, was shaped by other people’s greater claims. They never saw her angry or emotional. Yet in her diaries she wrote about her naked body.