Affected by these memories, they reflect upon their own. They remember the night of the Zodiacs, how Patty had heard about the entertainment and Tom had gone to it. Tom remembers Derek Birthistle banished to the cloakroom during catechism, and Neck Daly and Deso Furphy giving the Mussolini salute in South Main Street, and the ebony ruler of Brother Meagher furiously rapping the blackboard. The first picture Patty ever saw in Traynor’s Picture Palace was The Girl of the Golden West ‘I never use the old cycle,’ Haverty said, and showed Tom how to oil the hubs and the chain, and how to raise and lower the saddle and handlebars. ‘They eat meat themselves on a Friday,’ Brigid explained when Patty had been at Carriglas a week, i’ll fry you an egg.’ Clonmel Countess won the Convivial Plate, and Haverty and Mr O’Hagan had her backed at forty to one. Mr Coyne had gone for Sally’s Pippin. In the outhouse that is still a workshop the mahogany dressing-table, once taken from Colonel Rolleston’s bedroom to have a leg repaired, is lost beneath the paint tins and bottles that clutter it. ‘This stuff’s worth a fortune, you know,’ Haverty said on one of the occasions he and Tom had to go on to the roof to repair the lead. You could repair a pinprick perforation by touching it with Seccotine or Durafix, but when the perforations were larger, or there were cracks, there wasn’t much you could do except to catch the drips. ‘We’d feel happier if you were in the house with us,’ Villana said when only she and Sarah Pollexfen were left. Tom sleeps in the room that was his father’s, and sits with Patty in the kitchen in the evenings. Six months ago the slates began to fall away from the roof of the gate-lodge.

‘I have things to do,’ Tom says in the kitchen, and is followed by his dog to the fields. The ground is hard, like iron beneath his feet. When he feels for the moist clay of the well he finds it turned to ice. On the ledge of rock that was once level with his eye, but which he looks down on now, the cache of crucifixes and coins has been added to over the years, but those he remembers from his childhood are still there. Every year still, in high summer, the women come. Ever since the death occurred he has been intending to make this visit.

Near by, his sheep huddle under a broken wall; he counts them as he passes. Five there are; fifteen he has counted on the side of the hill; others graze the grass beneath the monkey puzzle and the strawberry trees. His cattle winter in the cobbled yard.